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potatocrab · 4 years

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Salvation is a Last Minute Business (13/18)

Chapter 13: An Abominable Man

At the Valentine Detective Agency, the group reconvenes to discuss MIT’s revelations to the public. With more questions than answers, it’s up to Piper to follow the trail while Nick continues the cold case investigation. After reliving a past trauma, Madelyn takes comfort in the distractions Deacon provides. Later, Nick and Madelyn follow a clue straight to the man they’ve been hunting for.

“He was an abominable man. Why do women marry abominable men?” - Charlotte Inwood as played by Marlene Dietrich (Stage Fright, 1950)

[read on Ao3] x [chapter masterpost]

May 16th, 1958

Man or Machine? –The Synthetic Truth Behind MIT

The newest copy Publick Occurrences was waiting on Ellie’s desk when Madelyn arrived at the agency early that Friday morning, the stack of newspapers fresh off the presses and ready for circulation. Piper certainly didn’t dawdle after attending the MIT demonstration—she knew how to strike when the iron was hot and get a story out in record time. But Piper was never one to procrastinate—if you gave her and inch, she’d run a mile. Madelyn was interested to see what kind of marathon the reporter would run this time.

“What do we really know about MIT?”

Piper’s question hung in the air of Nick’s office as she paced before his desk, arms crossed with a steely expression. The detective himself was still reading over that morning’s edition, already on his second smoke of the day—nobody dared to reprimand him for getting such an early start, not when he was still within his grieving period. Madelyn watched the newshound’s movements from her usual spot in the armchair to the left, wondering if Piper’s eyebrows furrowed any further they might mold together into one, brown, bushy line. She hid her amusement behind her hand, glancing back to where Deacon was leaning against the back wall, holding a relaxed smirk as he silently observed the room’s occupants from behind his tinted shades. Even though the chair next to her was empty, she knew he was more comfortable where he stood, still cautious about being invited back into the fray of agency life.

“You’re worried about…” Nick looked up from reading the Publick Occurrences article. “A robot?”

Piper balked in offence, abruptly stopping in her strides to face him. “Jesus, Nick, did you lose track of your reading comprehension skills or something?”

“Not a robot,” she corrected, waving her hands in dramatic fashion as Nick frowned at her intended insult. “An android. A synth. MIT have essentially built themselves an infiltration unit—”

“We don’t know that,” Nick interrupted with a grumble.

“They installed it with a distinct personality,” Piper explained, gesturing to the black and white photo of the mechanical man that had been presented the previous day. “The Doctor said it himself. Makes it so they are indistinguishable from you or I.”

Nick rubbed at his chin as he studied the snapshot before pulling away to stare at his prosthetic hand—built by the very scientists Piper was questioning. He clenched his fingers into a fist and sighed. “I’d like to think I’d be able to tell that thing from a human,” he muttered, extinguishing his cigarette. He refrained from igniting a third from his nearby pack. “Looks fairly metal to me.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” Piper argued. She pivoted, gesturing towards Madelyn and Deacon. “You were there! You saw how it moved.”

“Yes,” Madelyn agreed with a short nod, though she had her own hesitations. Despite the suspicion raised at the demonstration, she wasn’t one to jump to conclusions without solid proof in hand. “Doctor Ayo suggested it would be years before the synth could actually look anything like a human.”

“Can we actually trust the scientists and researchers at MIT?” Piper countered.

This wasn’t her usual wild goose-chase or paranoia fueling her, but genuine fear and concern. A kind of worry that Madelyn hadn’t seen in her friend since they started investigating Eddie Winter’s rise as family crime boss and his rampant spree through Boston. But this wasn’t some mobster they were after, this was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—a revered university that had always played a pivotal role in the city’s development of modern science. Without the Institute—as some affectionately called the college—Boston would still be in the dark ages. Like any industry giant, however, so much of what the Institute accomplished was shrouded in mystery. From their elusive board of directors, to their once-in-a-blue-moon presentations—it was any wonder Piper was suspicious.

“The way that doctor spoke,” Piper continued, a little calmer than before. “There’s the implication they’ve built more than one, and they’re just itching to put them to use. If they haven’t already.”

She picked up a spare copy of Publick Occurrences from Nick’s desk and stared at her own headline. “It bears repeating. What do we really know about the Institute?”

Silence settled within the room as the group contemplated what Piper said.

“She’s right.”

Madelyn peered over at Deacon, who barely moved from his spot against the wall. He offered a small shrug as he repeated his words. “She’s right,” he spoke, much to Piper’s surprise. “What do we know?”

“You’ve covered them before, right?” he asked, continuing his train of thought. “Something about the mayor’s campaign funds?”

The journalist raised a curious eyebrow in his direction. “Didn’t realize you were such an avid reader of my publication.”

“I like to stay informed,” Deacon replied, cheekily. “Freedom of the press, and all that.”

“They’ve shown up in Railroad reports as well,” Madelyn added, keeping the conversation on point. It certainly caught Piper and Nick’s attention. Deacon, however, seemed less than enthused about her sharing insider knowledge. But the information was out in the open now, ripe for dissection.

“Seems suspicious—promising,” Piper said with a curious smile. She glanced to Deacon. “For an undercover organization, can’t you find out more? Send one of your agents to snoop around the university for secrets? Sneak around yourself, Mr. Spy?”

“You make it sound so easy,” he responded with a smirk, though Madelyn could tell Piper’s tone was getting on his nerves. “Why don’t you go stalk the boogeyman, Miss Wright?”

“Maybe I will!”

“For once I’d like to have a civil conversation in my office,” Nick interrupted, already striking a new match to light another cigarette.

Madelyn could only imagine the amount of stress he was experiencing, and their presence wasn’t helping. She glanced at the others. “We might as well start from the beginning. What else do we know about the university? Media reports, rumors…anything?”

“There was an attack in 1955 at University Point,” Deacon recalled. “A fight broke out between some Mass Bay and MIT students over some supposedly stolen tech. One of the MIT kids lost control and beat a Mass Bay freshman to a bloody pulp.”

“I wrote about that too,” Piper remarked. “The student died. Didn’t think it was anything but a student brawl gone bad. Seen plenty of those covering the Fens district. What does that have to with what they’re doing now?”

“You’re the one who’s suggesting they’ve been using synths longer than they claim,” Deacon explained. “I’m just trying to offer evidence that supports your theory, is all.”

“That would mean…” Madelyn trailed, alarmed by the connotation. She furrowed her brows, unable to wrap her head around what was being suggested. She wasn’t about to trust what the Institute scientists had claimed at the demonstration—that they were years away from life-like synths— but she needed more proof than one incident that sounded more like a disagreement gone awry. “Is there anything else?”

“1949,” Nick spoke, gaining everyone’s interest. “I had just set up the agency here. Vadim told me about an Italian restaurant across the way from the stadium, praised their homemade pasta,” he leaned back in his chair, clearly reminiscing on nearly a decade’s old memory. “Before I could make a visit, the place was shut down. Turns out a professor, Mr. Carter, from MIT decided it was the perfect place to commit mass murder.”

“I remember that restaurant, but I’ve never heard about that!” Piper seemed genuinely shocked, especially as someone who had lived in the Boston area all her life. “What happened?”

“Seemed like any other patron at first, according to witnesses. Sat at the bar and told war stories, spoke about a big government grant his department had just been given. Then suddenly—” Nick snapped his fingers, his expression solemn as he explained. “Pulled out a revolver and started shooting. After an hour-long stand-off, Boston P.D. opened fire and put him down. When the dust settled, eight people were dead, including the professor.”

Madelyn pointed out what she hoped would be obvious. “If Mr. Carter were a synth, you’d think they’d be able to determine that after his death.”

“Assuming there wasn’t a cover-up,” Nick offered with a shake of his head. “The event itself was conveniently swept away in the news-cycles. Between the Red Scare in Hollywood and some ape dying in space—”

“Poor Albert,” Deacon quipped. Madelyn resisted the urge to laugh amidst their serious discussion and looked his way. He only smiled.

Nick cleared his throat, pulling their attention back. “As I was saying,” he tapped his fingers against the newspaper spread across his desk. “That’s two instances of MIT personnel losing themselves to madness. Piper, you’re the one who is worried about synths going unchecked. Malfunctioning and attacking without provocation. I’m all for throwing accusations against a reputable establishment when something smells rotten, but you need to be sure before going after something, or someone as big as the Institute.”

He was right, even as he inferred he believed Piper’s theories. Madelyn thought about what the group had discussed, and what she’d seen at the MIT conference the previous day. To think that the university had lied and had secretly placed realistic synths—indistinguishable from real humans—in the Boston populace. Worse yet, they had been doing so for years. Confusion settled in her mind—why? Why come forward now with the revelation of a new prototype if they’d been infiltrating the city all this time? It wouldn’t be the first time she dealt with a corruption scandal. What did the university have to gain from planting sleeper agents—synths��throughout Boston in the first place? She only ended up with more questions than answers.

Piper seemed to share a similar sentiment, a worrisome frown etched into her features. “I’ll hit the streets, connect with some sources,” she paused, giving Nick a cautious glance. “I know you still don’t trust him, but ol’ Danny Sullivan might be my best shot at getting any information from old police files,” she rolled her eyes when he groaned. “Or would you rather I break into precincts, for old time sakes?”

“Do what you will,” Nick sighed, rubbing at his temple. “Just leave us out of it for the time being,” he motioned towards Madelyn. “We’ve got enough on our hands with this cold case.”

Not that Piper needed his permission to follow her own leads for a story, but it was nice to have the support of a friend—the three had been working together for a few years now, and despite her reputation, she wasn’t one to run off and go rogue. Especially when it could put herself, or others, in danger. Considering they’d just come off from putting an end to Eddie Winter and his wide-spread corruption, she needed to tread lightly—well, as lightly as Piper was capable of. With a shrug, she moved to occupy the opposite armchair, sinking back into the cushions.

“Do you think any of this is connected to the Shaun Perlman case at all?” Madelyn decided to ask, gauging Nick’s reaction.

“I’d rather not cross that bridge right now,” he mumbled, dragging his palm across his face in exasperation. He shot a warning glance to Piper before she could get started. “Better we focus on the best lead we have—the kidnapper, and the fact he very well may be the same man who killed Madelyn’s husband.”

It felt like the air was sucked out of the room as she sensed all eyes focus on where she was sitting. She hadn’t expected Nick to be so upfront about sharing the information, but they were amongst trusted colleagues—anyone else and she likely would’ve had a more hostile reaction. That being said, she hadn’t divulged any case details to Deacon, and she his subtle reaction to the news didn’t go unnoticed out of the corner of her eye. Her secrecy wasn’t to be deceptive, but rather to protect her emotions. Madelyn was still struggling with the reality of the situation, and it took all the mental fortitude she had left to focus on helping to solve the case.

“What are you talking about?” Piper asked, looking between her and Nick.

“Preston, our witness from Concord. His description of the kidnapper…” he trailed.

“That wasn’t all,” Madelyn reluctantly added. “The way the wife, Nora…the way she described the kidnapping. It was all too familiar,” she swallowed down the nervous flutter rising in her throat and steadied her breathing the best she could. “From being ambushed in a public setting, to the way he made them—us—beg for our lives.”

“You don’t have to—” Nick tried to interrupt but she hushed him with one steely look.

“He was wearing a military fatigue and a leather jacket. His head was shaved, and there was a long scar that crossed over his left eye—just as Preston described,” Madelyn continued. “His gun wasn’t military issue, that much I know. Had to be modified, on account of the—” she broke off as the tears prickled her vision. Deacon shifted from his spot against the back wall, but she shook her head, silently rooting him to the spot.

“The coroner pulled a .44 hollow point from Nate’s chest,” she stated, biting back the overwhelming desire to cry. She lowered her gaze, focusing on the wedding ring she’d moved to her right hand. “Same kind they pulled from…” she found herself unable to say the husband’s name.

Nick took note of her struggle and interjected. “Mr. Perlman’s arm.”

Piper loudly clapped her hands together, causing Madelyn to flinch at the sound. She didn’t pause to apologize before she was bent forward and speeding through another tangent. “That weapon! A .44 caliber with hollow point bullets? I’ve read about several unsolved murders up and down the Eastern coastline with that modus operandi.”

“We can’t say that every shooting with a magnum was him, can we?” Madelyn asked, focusing her attention on Nick. He was smoking again, but she’d lost track of what number he was on.

“No,” he mumbled, the cigarette bobbing between his lips as he maneuvered the paperwork strewn about his desk, pulling out a tattered notebook. She wasn’t sure what he was looking at when he started reading. “1950—robbery outside the Boylston Club. Two injured, one dead, with—wouldn’t you know—a .44 hollow point bullet to the head.”

Madelyn grimaced, trying not to imagine what that would’ve looked like for the victim—perhaps Nate had it easier, even if he had a slow, and painful death.

“There was a suspect,” Nick read on, flipping though an old casefile. “Released on a technicality, but we all know by now that is code for corruption. Disappeared after that. No trace.”

“How much do you want to bet it’s our guy?” Piper asked to nobody in particular.

“Five bucks says it was Kellogg!”

Everybody in the room turned towards the new presence in the doorway—MacCready, who stared back with equal surprise. “Didn’t mean to eavesdrop or nothin’ but…” he jutted his thumb over his shoulder towards the lobby. “That blonde chick wasn’t around to shoo me away, so I thought I’d—”

“Who the hell is Kellogg?” Nick stopped him from rambling.

“Oh, yeah. Right,” MacCready stepped into the office and shrugged. “Way you described him and that gun, only one person I know that fits the bill,” he said. “Conrad Kellogg.”

“Who is he?” Piper asked this time, turning in her seat so she could look at the former mercenary properly.

“Used to run with the Gunners, still might for all I know, but was high up in the ranks way before I came to Boston,” MacCready explained, leaning over the back of the armchair where Piper sat. “Rumor has it he killed some gang leader out in California before heading East. Never met him, but he’s got one hell of a reputation. Can’t believe that fu—” he hesitated, awkwardly clearing his throat. “Guy is still alive.”

“We don’t know that,” Nick said for the second time that morning. “Hasn’t been any reports of similar cases since—”

“Since Nate,” Madelyn finished, gulping down the ache that had formed in her chest.

“At least now you have a name,” Piper remarked, but it was hardly any consolation. “A lead. Better than nothing.”

“Sure, sure,” Nick agreed, though he didn’t lift his gaze from Madelyn, the two sharing a silent exchange. “MacCready, you know anybody in Quincy who’d be willing to talk?”

Their mercenary-turned-informant looked stunned, jolting upright as he anxiously rubbed at his neck. Getting dragged into another investigation was probably not why he had chosen to visit the agency that morning. Whatever the reason, it would have to wait. “Well, sure,” he muttered, avoiding eye contact. “Yeah, I guess.”

Nick pushed back his chair to stand, moving towards the nearby coatrack to tug on his patched trench-coat and fedora. He pointed to the younger man. “Alright. You’re with me.”

When the detective noticed the confusion on Madelyn’s face, his expression settled. “I’m officially assigning you R&R.”

She couldn’t help but smile a little. “You don’t have the authority to assign me.”

Nick rolled his eyes, mumbling something about how stubborn women would be the death of him before nodding towards Deacon. Her Railroad partner understood the gesture and moved away from his spot to stand next to her. She didn’t need watching over, or protection, but she’d gladly take a reprieve if it meant spending time with him. Madelyn glanced up to find him with a tiny smile of his own, and he reached out to give her shoulder a comforting squeeze before retreating his hand back to his side before anyone could notice.

“Piper,” Nick gave the reporter a pointed stare before exhaling as he shook his head. “Whatever you do, just—be careful.”

She stood, playfully mocking him with a salute. “Aye, aye, detective.”

“You lied.”

“Of course I lied,” Deacon responded without missing a beat. “Which lie are we talking about?”

Madelyn softly laughed from her spot across the circular dining table, watching as he poured her another glass of wine. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been out to dinner—to an actual restaurant that wasn’t a 24-hour café—and was suddenly grateful for Nick’s subtle push. On Deacon’s suggestion they traveled uptown and found themselves a hidden gem of an Italian bistro in the process. More than one macabre joke about running into an Institute spy was made, wondering if Nick’s earlier mention of pasta had indoctrinated them, if only a little.

“When Piper asked about sending an undercover Railroad agent to MIT,” she clarified, bringing her refilled glass to her lips. “You lied.”

A sideways smirk. “I didn’t lie, I just omitted the truth.”

Madelyn chuckled, nearly choking on her drink. “That’s—that’s the same thing!”

“Hardly,” he countered with a wave of his hand. “Do you honestly think I’d talk about Railroad business in front of Piper?” It was a rhetorical question, followed up with words Madelyn had heard him speak time and time again, “you can’t trust everyone.”

She sighed, and couldn’t help it as her demeanor fell, ever so slightly. “Even me?”

Deacon’s expression was hard to read—it always was when he shielded his eyes with those sunglasses—but she figured he was studying her carefully. After all the emotional breakthroughs they’d shared, she didn’t want to think for a second he didn’t trust her—not when he was one of the very few she found faith in. She wondered if it had anything to do with her holding back information on the Shaun Perlman case, and even more doubt filled her mind. Before he could say anything, she had to speak—

“Sorry,” she set her wine glass down and fidgeted with the linen tablecloth. “I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you about what Nick and I discovered while investigating. I should’ve said something sooner and—”

“Charmer,” Deacon stopped her short, reaching over the small table to cover her hand with his own, giving her fingers a gentle squeeze. “That doesn’t bother me. If it wasn’t you, I would’ve snooped around and found out already. But that’s not my place in this partnership, not anymore. I trust you to tell me whatever’s important, on your own terms.”

Trust—there it was.

Madelyn gradually allowed the smile to return and flicked her gaze across his face. “Does that mean I’m allowed to have secrets?”

“A few,” he caught on to her tease. “You still haven’t told me who really taught you how to pick locks.”

Her chest tightened as she thought about her departed husband, simultaneously reminiscing about her and Deacon’s first jaunt together through the underground Switchboard tunnels. Her fingers twitched beneath his grasp. “Who says anybody taught me?” she joked, recovering as best she could.

He nodded, flashing that secret smile that told her he knew she was bluffing—but he was never one to rat her out. Instead, he leaned back in his chair, slowly withdrawing his hand from hers.

“Dez is the only one that knows,” he started. “We’ve had an inside man—hell, it might be a woman—nobody has met with the agent face to face,” Deacon’s lips skewed to the side in thought. “They aren’t an official Railroad operative. But they’re the ones that started feeding us information while we were still operating at the Switchboard.”

“Why didn’t you say something earlier?” Madelyn asked, trying not to sound accusatory.

“Back then, Dez and I weren’t sure of what we were dealing with,” he explained. “It was all coded. Most of it still is. We only knew the source was coming from what we believed to be an ally, working on the inside.”

“How can you be so sure?” She was rightfully skeptical. “You never found out who was responsible for attacking the Switchboard.”

“Fair point,” Deacon replied with a shrug. “We never stopped receiving correspondence either. Even after moving to the church. Dead drops with encrypted MIT data from Doctor Rendezvous themselves.”

She tried not to laugh. “Is that what you call them? Of all the codenames…”

“No,” he shook his head. “Dez and I call them Patriot.”

At least that explained all the reports Tinker Tom and Glory had been sifting through for the last several weeks. She wondered if any of it would prove fruitful, and if something of value would materialize sooner rather than later. You can’t trust everyone—and yet, the Railroad leaders seemed to be playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with an unknown. She hoped they knew what they were doing.

“Enough work chat,” Deacon mused, plucking the napkin from his lap and placing it across the table. “What would you say to some blueberry pie?”

Madelyn grinned, pulled from her doom and gloom thoughts. “Yes.”

-x-

It was a short, hand-in-hand stroll through the uptown district to the Olympia Theatre, where she fixated on the matinee signs advertising Gigi—she hadn’t seen a film in years. If it wasn’t a late night rerun on CBS, she was completely out of the loop on modern day culture. She’d seen Leslie Caron in An American in Paris—a movie date with Nate so many years ago—seeing her picturesque face on the advertisement now brought back bittersweet memories.

“Pie and dancing tonight,” Deacon’s voice was suddenly in her ear as he leaned close. “Lerner and Loewe tomorrow.”

The promise alone caused excitement to bloom in her heart, even if a trickle of guilt remained. He gently tugged on her hand, and she followed him down the cobblestone alleyway to the familiar red door and golden placard, leaving the theatre behind.

The Memory Den was expectedly crowded for a Friday evening, but as soon as Irma caught sight of the two, she quickly ushered them to a private corner of the bar. Madelyn recognized it as Deacon’s corner—if he had such a claim to the place. Given Irma was an unspoken Railroad informant, Madelyn was sure he could very well have run of the place—especially now that Eddie Winter was out of the picture. It was hardly quiet were they perched themselves on two barstools as the house band played an upbeat song, but Irma’s cheery voice was loud as ever.

“We have a live singer tonight,” she boasted, standing between them with her hands on her hips.

Madelyn chuckled as she glanced towards the stage. “As long as it isn’t Bobby Darin.”

“Oh—” Irma faltered, unsure of her joke. “Uh, no. You’ll see! They came all the way from New York!” she beamed. “Now, I’ve seen the way you two can move, so why are you sittin’ around?”

Deacon arched an eyebrow and leaned against the bar-top. “We can’t dance on an empty stomach.”

Ironic, considering their stomachs were full of pasta, bread and wine. Madelyn only smiled at Irma when she glanced between them with curiosity. The other woman sighed before moving around the bar, walking down to the far end of the counter where a glass display showcased a variety of deserts. After a few minutes, she returned with a plate and two forks.

“Lucky you,” Irma remarked. “Last slice of the night.”

Deacon deferred to Madelyn, allowing her the first bite—it was just as delicious as she remembered, when he brought her an entire blueberry pie from Irma on Valentine’s Day. She held her palm beneath her chin on the second bite, trying not to disperse crumbs or berries all over her satin dress. She didn’t realize Deacon was watching her movements until she went for a third forkful, noticing he hadn’t taken his first. Very suddenly, a blush crept up her cheeks and he smirked.

Irma baked away with a bright grin. “You’re welcome!”

Deacon finally took a bite, followed up with a second so they were even. They sat and ate in silence, smiling and laughing at each other over nothing and everything as the atmosphere around them intensified. Madelyn blamed it on being tipsy from her dinner wine, but a lingering thought in the back of her mind echoed it was more than that. It was always more with Deacon.

“You said there’d be dancing,” Madelyn noted, eying the crowd of dancers when their desert was finished. The singer Irma mentioned had taken the stage and had already played through a melody of fast-paced swing ensembles to warm up the audience and the band.

He nodded, taking her hand in his as he slid off the barstool to stand. As soon as they navigated through the throng of people, the lights dimmed into a bluish-purple hue, and the band’s music slowed. It didn’t deter them—they’d slow danced before, but that was undercover and what felt like a lifetime ago. This was something entirely different. Deacon’s arms encircled her waist, one hand on her lower back and the other planted firmly between her shoulders. Madelyn loosely wrapped her arms around his neck, leaned back far enough so she could study his face in the dark lighting.

“Last time we were here, you tried to slice my throat in the hallway,” he smiled at the memory, and so did she. Thinking back, it was any wonder he hadn’t turned the tables and pinned her to the wall—he certainly possessed the strength to do so. Madelyn didn’t let the thought get carried away in her mind, as much as it thrilled her.

“You weren’t so keen on dancing with me,” he remarked, tilting his head to the side.

“But I did,” she countered, inching herself closer. “You were a stranger. I should’ve known better, but I still danced with you.”

Deacon shrugged. “I still might be a stranger, you never know.”

“Bullshit.”

“Adorable,” he retorted, right on cue. “You still want to dance with me, after everything you know?”

Madelyn suddenly wondered if they were speaking in code—Deacon wasn’t really talking about dancing, was he? She desperately wished she could see beyond the tinted shades he was wearing, knowing if she caught a glimpse of those baby blues, she’d have her answer within a heartbeat. Regardless of the inuendo, she knew what to say.

“Why not?” she offered in a soft voice. “You make one hell of a partner.”

He smiled. “You’re not so bad yourself, Charmer.”

As the song continued, she steadily drew herself closer until she was resting her head against his shoulder, swaying slowly in his arm as the soothing beat echoed around them.

“You’ll see me home tonight?” she asked, closing her eyes to the world around her. She felt his lips brush against her temple near her ear as he whispered so only she could hear.

“Yes.”

-x-

Madelyn had never traversed the stairwell of her apartment so slowly. With Deacon at her side, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to reach the seventh floor, knowing that when they reached her door he would have to depart. That wasn’t necessarily true, but after the evening’s events, she wasn’t entirely sure if inviting him in for their usual nightcap would constitute crossing some kind of unspoken line. But what had started as a distraction had turned into what felt like a date. She was faced with an increasing dilemma with every step, one she’d been suppressing for weeks.

Their relationship—whatever it was—wasn’t a topic of discussion. Even after so many near misses, and what might as well have been a confession in a church—of all places—Madelyn couldn’t pinpoint where they stood. Partners? Friends? Something more? Or something in-between? Mitigating circumstances forced them to pump the brakes before discovering if what they had was meant to be. But now, Madelyn was tired of waiting, tired of hiding her emotions to the world. All she wanted to do was drive off the cliff with a lead foot and find out.

“Charmer,” he said her name—her codename—in that sly way of his as he leaned against the doorway outside her apartment, glancing up at the shiny lettering D. Madelyn took it as some kind of sign. “Here we are.”

She nodded but didn’t move to rummage through her purse for her keys. “Here we are,” she repeated. Her eyes danced across the hall. “Do you think Drummer Boy is listening to us right now?”

“Without a doubt,” he responded with a soft laugh. “He needs all the gossip he can get.”

There was somebody else that was listening too, judging by the robotic voice that echoed out from beyond her door. “Miss Madelyn, is that you? Oh, it’s such a late hour!”

She groaned, pressing a hand to her forehead in a vain attempt to hide her embarrassment. What was worse than having a Mister Handy that acted like her parental guardian, reprimanding her if she came home past midnight?

“Your metal hubby is calling for you,” Deacon joked. His next action surprised her as he reached up to remove his sunglasses, tucking them away in his coat pocket. Even in the faint lighting of her hallway, his eyes gleamed with a certain kind of magic. “Shouldn’t keep him waiting.”

“Let him wait,” she hushed.

It was the cue she needed, taking a hesitant step forward, closer to where he was. She reached out, one hand gripping the fabric of his tie while the other sought out the side of his face, tugging gently to bring him closer. Madelyn thought about all the times she’d wanted to kiss him but didn’t, all the times they’d almost kissed but hadn’t, every time he had slipped through her fingertips. Standing there, in front of her apartment door, it seemed to mirror previous occasions—they were so close, Deacon’s breath ghosting over her mouth as their hooded eyes locked under the intensity. She hesitated, waiting for the other foot to drop, for some kind of interruption—except, it never came. Instead, his hand at her waist tugged her just close enough as he tilted his chin and—bliss—as their lips softly met.

For a long moment, the kiss was nothing but chaste, sweet. But there was a certain kind of desperation behind the contact—understandable considering how long it had been for her since her last kiss. She wasn’t sure how long it had been for him, but if she believed what he’d said about his wife—which she did—it had to be a significant time. Madelyn increased the pressure first, Deacon taking the cue to slide his tongue past her lips. His fingers gripped her side as they continued, the two content with the measured pace being set. Even though they both had done their fair share of waiting—there was no need to rush.

With a soft breath, she reluctantly pulled away, a delightful heat encompassing her entire body. She relished in being able to witness the sparkle of Deacon’s eyes, his blown pupils as they darted across her face and body before snapping back up to meet her gaze.

“Shouldn’t keep him waiting,” he repeated, voice raspy. As far as goodbyes and goodnights went, it was fitting for the Railroad spy. He smirked, replacing his sunglasses where they belonged before slowly backing away towards the stairwell. “Charmer.”

Madelyn didn’t enter her apartment until she was sure Deacon had descended at least a few flights of stairs, leaning against the door as she closed it behind her. Her heart was racing, the speed of which made it feel like it was lodged in her throat. She raised her fingers to trace over her lips where his mouth had just been and felt a warmth she had been chasing for months—years—a sprinkle of goosebumps appeared across her skin. She felt foolish, like a schoolgirl with a crush all over again—except, this was much more than a crush. She felt a rush. She felt alive. She felt—

“Mum?” Codsworth’s voice made her realize he’d been hovering in front of her frozen state, robotic eyes zooming in on her body with curiosity. “Are you alright?”

“Yes,” she answered, without hesitation. “Never better.”

May 18th, 1958

“You’re smiling.”

Madelyn tried her best to suppress the grin she knew was pulling at her lips but failed. “Am I?”

She glanced over to Nick as they walked, noting that for some inexplicable reason he was in a better mood than usual. It likely had something to do with their case, and how after a decade of little to no progress, things had heated up in a matter of days. After leaving her alone for most of the weekend, he’d finally called her early that Sunday morning with an update from his own investigating. He had a lead promising enough that it demanded swift action, though Madelyn was glad to be back on the streets and investigating with the detective—just like old times.

“Yeah,” he nodded, raising a quizzical brow in her direction. “Something I should know?”

Madelyn played coy, moving closer to link her arm in his as they continued their stroll down the Fenway district sidewalks. She patted his coat affectionately. “Mr. Valentine, don’t you know a lady shouldn’t kiss and tell?”

The surprise in his expression was short-lived as he caught on to her insinuation, and after a small stretch of silence, a low smirk settled on his face. “It’s a good look, doll.”

“Where are we headed?” Madelyn asked before he could start a line of questioning—not that she expected it, but she wanted to avoid any unnecessary pestering. “You never told me how your little date in Quincy faired.”

“I’ll tell you about my date when you tell me about yours,” he countered, with expert precision. Instead of taking offense, Madelyn laughed. They hadn’t bantered in so long and it felt refreshing. “MacCready can be a hard-ass, when you need him to be.”

“Good cop, bad cop?”

“Detectives,” Nick corrected. If there was one thing he hated, it was being mistaken for any member of the Boston police force—even if the two had snuffed out Eddie Winter’s corruption. It was one of the reasons they were heading this investigation on their own, and without assistance from the inside. As far as they knew, the only people worth trusting were themselves. “We got what we needed. Last known address for a one Conrad Kellogg.”

The pair continued walking past the large green walls of the Fenway stadium until they reached they grouping of apartments situated on the western side of the district. Almost immediately, the memory of when they’d last visited the Parkview Apartments came flooding back and she stared up at the tall buildings.

“Earl Sterling,” she muttered under her breath before looking to Nick. “Is it coincidence that Boston serial killers like to congregate in one area?”

“Cheap place to live, in a nondescript area of the city,” Nick frowned. “Hiding in plain sight. Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe they don’t realize they all eventually follow the same patterns eventually.”

The two didn’t delay for much longer in the courtyard, entering the building and ascending the stairs after finding initials C.K. on one of the lobby’s mailboxes. On the fourth floor, they made their way towards a faded green door, Nick double checking the number scrawled on a lose piece of paper before shoving it back into his pocket.

“This is the place,” he assured.

“Looking for someone?”

Nick and Madelyn turned to find not exactly who they expected—a well dressed man in a tan colored suit, a freshly picked flower pinned to his lapel. He regarded them with a polite smile, but there was something unsettling about the way he stared ahead that had Madelyn’s skin crawling. Be it the location they were in, or the assumption of the people who lived there, she didn’t want to make any sudden movements.

“Do you know anything about the person who lives here?” Madelyn asked.

The suited man shook his head. “Lived. Haven’t seen his handsome face in quite a while.”

“Did he die?” she continued her line of questioning, careful not to reveal too much about the circumstances of why they were there. “We’re…old college classmates of his. In town and thought to surprise him.”

“Oh, I do love surprises,” the man replied with the same, measured smile as before. “He isn’t dead. Just gone. Just like that child that came to visit every now and again. What an adorable young man.”

“A child?” Nick questioned, on high alert.

“Around ten years old, I should say,” the man answered, raising his hand to gesture height. “Hm. But what do I know? He always did say I was…too nosy.”

“Thank you,” Madelyn hesitantly nodded. “For letting us know.”

He made to move past them down the hallway in the opposite direction but stopped at the last moment. “The next time you’re in the neighborhood, please, stop by my gallery,” his recommendation came in a soft, eerie tone. “I have a feeling you’d be an admirer.”

Madelyn’s grip on Nick’s arm didn’t loosen until the mystery man was out of sight and even he didn’t seem to relax until all was quiet around them.

“Jesus,” he muttered, swiftly turning towards the apartment door and shuffling through his coat pockets, pulling out a lockpick. He made quick work of the deadbolt, catching the doorknob in his hand so it wouldn’t swing open. “Come on.”

Nick took the lead, his gun unholstered and at his side as he took measured steps through the small space. Madelyn followed, closing the door behind her and securing the lock—the last thing they needed was a visitor while they were sneaking around. The apartment itself was sparse, barely filled with any furniture or proof that anyone had lived there before or had been there recently. As she loitered near the kitchen nook, glancing over a pile of forgotten comic books and a case of cigars, she heard Nick call from the back bedroom.

“All clear!” he announced. “What do you make of this?”

The bedroom was just as empty as the entranceway, a double bed and desk occupying the space. Madelyn found Nick studying a pile of documents, shifting them about with a mix of confusion and concern. She plucked a dusty file from the stack and was alarmed to see a familiar set of emblems and insignia.

“These are military documents,” she confirmed what he already knew, being a former airman himself. “What are they doing here?”

Nick shook his head, unsure. “Kellogg was described as a military man in suspect reports. What if that description is accurate and he really is an enlisted officer?”

“A killer in the ranks?” Madelyn didn’t want to believe it.

Nick didn’t respond, his eyes shifting rapidly as he read over more and more of the scattered reports, even if they were mostly redacted. Madelyn couldn’t make heads or tails of them—she never could, even when she would try to sneak a peak at the files Nate would bring home. Whatever Kellogg was researching, it involved a scientific endeavor—backed by the government and heavily funded—that required top level security clearance.

“There’s only one military base in town that would be responsible for such a project,” Nick explained. Madelyn knew. The only question would be how to get inside.

He tapped the document. “Fort Hagen.”

#fallout 4 #noir au #deacon x f!solesurvivor #madelyn hardy #deacon #nick valentine #piper wright #robert joseph maccready #and other spoiler characters...#more easter eggs than your body can handle!#something happens in the chapter that you've all been waiting for #👀👀👀

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calamity-callie · 4 years

Text

A Noble Quest - Wiztober Day 18

This story is about my non-wizard wizard 101 OC Iridian! The defeat theme is more subtle, as it’s not so much a defeat for her as it is a defeat for the rest of Avalon...

CW: blood, gore, graphic violence

Art and editing done by @spiralcompendium

It should have been another calm day in Avalon.

It should have been, but early that morning, a roar from the wild jolted everyone in Caer Lyon out of their peaceful sleep. The nobility and townsfolk alike gathered at the city entrance to see what would cause such a commotion. Only a few minutes passed before they saw her riding out of the woods into the city.

She appeared to be a wealthy, gallant knight; riding into town in shining steel plate armor, partisan and shield strapped to her back. Her family insignia was proudly displayed on her chest - a boar and a bull, flanking a silver axe. She rode upon what appeared to be the source of the vicious roar, a dignified lightning lizard with two large horns, storm energy crackling and sparkling around its mouth, and two massive wings, folded against its sides. Upon seeing the crowd, she lifted her visor to reveal an attractive, but intense face. She had piercing white irises while the whites appeared dull and gray. A strand of pure white hair fell into her face, which she brushed aside. She began to address the crowd.

“Good people of this city, I am Ser Iridian.”

At this point, the city mayor had pushed his way to the front of the crowd, and addressed her in turn. “To what do we owe the pleasure of your disruption?”

“I’m simply passing through. I’m on a noble quest you see. There’s a vitally important task I must complete. Indeed, failure to complete this task could even result in the destruction of your home.” At this, the crowd gasped and began to part to let her though. “I do apologize for disrupting your pleasant morning, but I had to stop for supplies on the way to my destination, and Tencendur,” she stopped to touch her dragon’s neck, “Tencendur here needed to hunt. Now if you could point me to the blacksmith, I’ll be on my way momentarily.”

The mayor pointed her in the right direction, and she rode off towards the lower district. Arriving at the smithy, she removed her shield and spear and set them down on the table. They both looked like they had seen years of use without proper repair, had layers of rust coating most surfaces, and had accumulated some sort of strange swirling energy. “Fix these up for me, would you? Price is no object, just get it done as quick as you can.”

“Very well,” the smith answered. He continued, “If ya don’t mind my askin’, what sort of quest are ye on anyway? What’s this destruction ye speak of?”

“It’s a family who lives just outside the city walls. I’ve heard of them doing just the most horrible things you could imagine - forcing children to fight for their amusement then tossing them on the street as soon as they lose, leaving the poor babe a traumatized mess. It’s my belief that this behavior shouldn’t be allowed to continue. After all, imagine having your own children taken away for their amusement!”

At this, the blacksmith recoiled. “Ma’am, that sounds downright awful. We can’t have people out there just doing things like that! Tell ye what, for such a noble quest as yours, I’ll do the work free of charge.”

Only a few hours later, Iridian headed out of the city gate and approached the large manor where the family lived, perfectly sharpened and polished weaponry in hand. She wound her way up the twisting path to the door while the serfs toiling the fields nearby looked away, occasionally shooting her fearful glances. As she approached the door, two men in plate armor crossed their swords in front of her, blocking her entrance. They sternly addressed her, “What is your business here?”

“I’m here to deliver a boon to the head of this manor, Sir Cedric Ward. I wish an audience with him at once.”

“What’s your name? Do you have an appointment? I’ll need to see proof of identification, a signed document of good intent, and a -”

The last word never left the guards lips, as Iridian had drawn her spear as he was speaking and thrust it into his throat. Blood ran from his neck as gurgling replaced the end of his tirade and he collapsed. The other guard raised a horn to his lips and began to blow, signaling the other guards in the barracks, but before he could get a second note out, Iridian had batted the instrument away with her shield, and plunged her spear into his stomach. She sliced to the side as she pulled it out, spilling entrails all over the entryway.

“Well, I’d hoped we’d have a cleaner start than this,” she thought to herself as she dismounted Tencendur. Turning to address the dragon, she said, “Those other guards will be here in no time. I’m heading inside. Protect me, alright?” The dragon snorted in understanding as she opened the front door.

She stepped into the extravagant entryway. Tapestries lined the walls, and a long hallway stretched out before her with many rooms on either side and a staircase in the back. She had three targets that needed to be taken out, three that were all complicit in the family’s crimes - the father, the mother, and their son.

She began her search of the house, beginning with the kitchen. She opened the door, only to be greeted by the shriek of two servants who were, moments before, butchering a freshly killed hart. One of them began to shout “Lady Ward! Lady Ward!” Iridian was quick to interrupt him, whisper-yelling “Keep quiet!” but to no avail, the servant kept shrieking. She interrupted him a second time with a spear to the heart, then quickly delivered a slash across the second servant’s neck. Both collapsed to the ground as blood began to pool around them.

“I’d wanted to avoid unnecessary death, but I will not allow anyone to get in my way,” she muttered to herself, gazing at the bodies. As she turned to leave the room though, she heard footsteps. She quickly positioned herself in the shadowy corner where the stone oven didn’t quite touch the wall. Soon the footsteps materialized as a woman in a floor-length beige and green gown, standing where she had a moment before, gazing down at the grisly scene.

Lady Ward shouted in rage, “Whoever you are, show yourself! Now!” She pulled a dagger out of her shoe and continued to yell, “I’ll cut you down where you stand!” At this moment, Iridian made herself known. She stepped out from the shadows and simply said, “Here I am.” Lady Ward turned and saw her, and her expression turned from rage to horror.

“Y-y-you! It’s not possible!”

“Yes, Lady Sybil Ward,” she said mockingly. “It is me. Your crimes are at an end.” She swung her shield at the Lady’s head, knocking her unconscious as she fell to the ground. “You will be punished for your misdeeds.” She raised her sabaton, and placed it on the unconscious woman’s head. “I will make sure you never hurt any child again!” She shifted all her weight onto the foot and pushed until she felt a crack. As the skull gave way, blood and matter splashed all around the floor. Iridian strolled over to the washing basin and splashed water on her armor, cleaning herself off. She mentally noted, “That’s one down. Doing well so far,” and exited the kitchen, closing the door on the mess she had left.

Back in the hallway, she marched up the stairs and made her way to Cedric’s study. As she passed one of the smaller offices, however, a servant stepped out into her path. He began to profusely apologize, but Iridian, now with fresh, noble blood on her mind, took her spear and impaled him without a second thought.

Arriving at the solar, she attempted to open the door but found it locked. Throwing all remaining sense of stealth to the wind, she kicked it down. Standing in front of her was Sir Ward himself standing in full armor and snatching a large claymore from one of the many racks of weapons. He turned to face her, weapon at the ready.

“Ah, Iridian. I supposed something out of the ordinary was going on, but I never thought I would see your hideous face again. Turn and flee now, and I may even let you live.”

“Flee? I could never do such a cowardly thing! I have lived in the Wyrd for the last ten years absorbing its harsh lessons. I’ve spent every day training and preparing myself for this moment when I can at last put you on trial--trial by combat!” Iridian’s face twisted into a dark grin as her eyes filled with rage and her dark whites swirled as if some mysterious force was working beneath.

“Very well then, if that’s what you want, then you will not leave this room alive!” Sir Ward lunged, sword poised to strike, but as he brought it down on her head, Iridian deflected it with her shield, stabbing her spear towards his undefended shoulder. He barely twisted out of the way and retaliated with a kick that sent her stumbling off balance.

As she fell to the ground, Sir Ward raised his sword up above her chest and plunged it down, but she rolled out of the way and jumped to her feet. She parried the next strike. This time taking better advantage of her opening, she plunged the spear into his clavicle.

He staggered back, dropping his weapon and clutching the handle as he fell to the ground. “I see… you’ve improved quite a lot…”

“I simply had a task set before me. I did what was necessary to accomplish it.”

Ser Ward continued, “I only ask… ask that you grant this old man one dying request… Please… spare my son…”

As the last words left his lips, he went limp. Iridian pulled the spear out of his shoulder, then, to ensure the deed was done, took the claymore and severed his head with it. As blood soaked into the carpet, she muttered to herself, “That’s two down. I’m sorry old man, but I must deny your request.” She made her way up to the top floor of the castle, and out onto the wall connecting the main building to the bedroom tower. A guard outside the door attempted to stop her entry, but she grabbed his shoulders and flung him over the crenellations without a word.

Stepping inside, she saw a child, only ten years old, drawing at the foot of a small bed. Silently, she raised her spear, and plunged it through the top of the boy’s skull. “That’s three,” she declared. She turned to leave the room, pausing to glance at the half-finished drawing. It matched the coat of arms displayed throughout the house--a bull and a boar flanking a silver axe.

She made her way back through the manor and stepped outside, where Tencendur was standing, surrounded by bodies scorched beyond recognition. Ser Iridian Ward mounted her dragon, and they took flight towards the Wyrd. As they passed over Caer Lyon, the dragon roared.

#w101 #wizard101 #wizzy fanfic #wiztober2020

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flamehairedwritings · 4 years

Text

The Fire In Your Eyes: Chapter Eleven

Characters: Arthur Morgan x Original Female Character

Rating: The whole series will be E, 18+ ONLY for violence, gore, character deaths, animal deaths, parent deaths, swearing, grief, sexual themes and unprotected sex.

Summary: Saved by Arthur Morgan when her town is attacked, a young woman’s past comes back to haunt her when she has no choice but to join the Van der Linde Gang.

Read on AO3

The Fire In Your Eyes Masterlist

Please don’t copy, steal or re-post my work; credit does not count.

Everything Inbetween

“Wine, signorina?”

A full glass appeared in front of her before the server had even finished his sentence.

She widened her smile a little as she accepted it, not taking a sip. The server retreated to the periphery of their vision, a lingering, silent presence.

Her gaze returned to Bronte. His men had left him, leaving only him, the armed guard and the server. She wouldn’t have minded the company of the two drunk men now. Bronte gestured to a chair a step away and she moved to sit in it as he seated himself in a chair opposite.

“Forgive me for prying, signorina,” he said as she arranged her skirt with her free hand to give it something to do, her purse in her lap, “but why are you up here and not enjoying yourself with the party?”

“I was looking for the powder room,” she answered, conjuring up a soft, endearingly embarrassed laugh. “I seem to have gotten lost, though.”

“Indeed.” He smiled at her laugh.

There was a pause that his silence forced her to fill.

“I’ve never been in a house as grand as this before, it’s beautiful.”

“Yes, it is.” He blew out a stream of smoke.

A game was being played here.

Her back straight, her features pleasant, her heart pounding, Ada smiled. “What was it you wanted to talk to me about, Signor Bronte?”

Bronte rested his arms on the armrests of the chair, his head tilting slightly. “When my boys told me two pretty women, a blonde and a redhead, were asking questions about me, I was intrigued.”

She didn’t move, her smile frozen.

He tapped his cigar, ash falling to the ground. “When my boys described this red-haired woman, well, I couldn’t help but find the description familiar.”

Her knuckles were white as she gripped the glass.

“Now, why did I find it so familiar..?” Bronte mused, as if he had just spoken with the boys who served him. He took a drag on his cigar, as if waiting for her to answer the question.

She stared at him.

He blew out a heavy stream of smoke, an easy smile on his lips. “Your uncle likes his tea, doesn’t he, signorina?”

Her chest tightened as she swallowed hard.

“He likes the way my servants make it, especially,” he continued, finally looking away to gaze out at the night sky. “When he told me of his woe and sorrow, I couldn’t not promise to help him reunite with his niece—”

“That’s not going to happen.”

His gaze cut back to her at her sharp words, the smile lingering.

“No?”

What was the use in playing a game when the opponent held all the cards?

“My uncle doesn’t care for me, Signor Bronte.”

Bronte tutted quietly. “Signorina, he cares very much that you are returned and his town is safe.”

A corner of her mouth lifted humourlessly. “Not out of love.”

He laughed. “Love... You know, this word, signorina, nobody does anything for love anymore. We’re all animals, fighting our way to the top.” He tilted his head again, looking almost sympathetic. “I cannot force you, Signorina Timmins—”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Oh, do excuse me, Signorina O’Driscoll—”

“Don’t—”

“It doesn’t matter what name you go by, signorina.” All humour had vanished from him now as he leaned closer, his tone low. “What a risk you take being here tonight. You still look the same, still sound the same, I imagine. What a beauty you truly do look, too, better than most of them down there.” He sat back again, shaking his head in gentle awe. “Magnifico. Is that why you have been sneaking around up here, signorina? Avoiding the attention you could so easily gather?”

He smiled as she remained silent.

“I’m so glad you could make it, Signorina Adaline. It wasn’t hard for my boys to follow you and the other woman back to your camp. Then, a simple suggestion to Dutch that I should like to see you, a fresh, pretty—”

“Have you told Dutch?” Dutch hadn’t given any inclination if Bronte had, but he could have been playing his own game.

Bronte waved his hand. “No, no... Not yet.”

She pressed her lips together.

Here it comes.

“What do you want?”

He chuckled. “You are so very bold to be here. What if your uncle were to strike up a conversation with Dutch, what if they are talking together right now as we speak, and they get on a little too well?”

She was too angry to be entirely afraid of what was to come.

"What do you want, Bronte?”

He just looked at her for a moment, smiling, then he reached inside his jacket. She stiffened. All he withdrew, though, was an envelope about the size of the book she’d been reading the morning before. He held it out to her.

“Say you found these while sneaking about.”

She glanced at the envelope. “What are they?”

“You can look inside if you like.”

It was her turn to now just look at him. Then, she reached out, placed her glass down and took the envelope. As he sat back and watched, Ada turned the envelope over and found the seal of the Mayor’s office keeping it closed.

She paused.

She broke the seal.

Placing the envelope in her lap, she withdrew two, folded pieces of paper. Opening them out, her gaze flicked up to his, her brow dipping.

“These are sketches of the bank.”

“How observant.”

Her eyes dropped to the papers. Detailed sketches of the interior and exterior of the bank lay before her, a few annotations here and there of improvements to be made. She recognised the handwriting from the documents on the Mayor’s desk.

She looked back up to Bronte. “Why don’t you give these to Dutch yourself?”

“Because I have asked you to. And you cannot return empty-handed, can you? That would be far too suspicious.”

Lowering the papers to her lap, she shook her head slightly, a frown lingering on her features. “Surely you must want something more?”

He held his hands open slightly. “I want you to support Dutch. He needs it. I see a very prosperous relationship regarding Mr. van der Linde. I wouldn’t want anything ruining it.” He gestured towards the papers. “Support him. I know that will be hard for you given your...” His mouth moved slightly, a hint of a smile. “... history, but it is better than the alternative, no?”

“I am not loyal to Colm O’Driscoll.”

He just shrugged, his smile lingering.

Ada looked back down at the papers. She had no choice.

Clearing her throat, she folded the papers and slid them back into the envelope before meeting his gaze. “Fine, I’ll do it.”

“Magnifico!” Bronte beamed, holding his hands open again. “Really, we can all benefit from this, signorina.” Looking over her shoulder, he nodded at someone she didn’t want to turn to see before looking back to her. “Thank you for your time, Signorina Sawyer, I promise you won’t regret this.”

Smiling tightly, she took her purse and rose as he did, and glanced down at his outstretched hand. Accepting it, her grip was firm as they shook hands.

“Now,” he continued brightly as he released her hand, “you may continue to sneak around up here or even stay here and delight me with your company, or Luca will escort you downstairs and make sure you are not seen.”

“I’ll see myself down, thank you.”

“Of course.” She despised his smile. “Thank you again, Signorina Sawyer. I do hope to see you again soon.”

“Good evening, Signor Bronte.”

Inclining her head, Ada turned and her gaze landed on Luca who Bronte must have nodded at. He smiled as he stepped out of her way.

“Good evening, signorina.”

She returned his smile, lightly.

“Oh, signorina...”

She paused.

Please just let me go.

Turning back to Bronte, she found his smile still in place as he pulled something out of his trouser pocket.

“Your uncle asked me to give you this...”

Her heart stopped.

The bastard, he had spoken to Nicholas, he had—

Her gaze dropped. A thick, silver ring lay in the centre of his palm.

Her breath caught.

“Take it. He wants you to have it back.” Bronte held his hand further out to her, his smile widening. “A gesture of goodwill.”

“Goodwill...” she breathed out incredulously as her eyes flicked back up to his, swiftly cutting herself off, swiftly stopping herself from giving him anymore satisfaction with her reaction.

Her teeth gritted, she swallowed hard and stepped closer. Reaching out, she took the ring, her hand quickly pulling back.

“He’s a very funny man,” Bronte said brightly as she slid her father’s ring back onto her right, middle finger.

“Yes, he is.” She thought she might have whispered the automatic response, staring at her hand.

Looking up to him again, she smiled tightly.

“Good evening, signor.”

Her walk through the doors and onto the landing was measured, every part of her wanting to run. She felt sick, her entire body cold. Once at the stairs and out of sight, she exhaled a breath and immediately inhaled a deep one, trying to soothe her pounding heart.

That had... How dare he...

She felt furious and helpless.

Ada descended the stairs slowly, one hand running along the wall, the other holding the envelope and her purse.

Just make it down the stairs. Go out the front door. Sit on the steps if you have to. Lenny might have stopped the carriage around the corner—

“Good evening, miss.”

Ada smiled swiftly at the servant who passed, continuing on. Entering the small foyer, she passed someone.

“Hey, where are you goin’?”

She didn’t stop.

Get outside. Breathe.

The front doors were in sight, one open. She quickened. Then, she was outside, the cool air engulfing her. Moving down the stairs, she tilted her head up to the night sky, taking in deep breaths.

Son of a bitch... Jesus Christ...

He had spoken with both of her uncles. Nicholas was here, Colm had been here, God, did that mean he was close now? Why had Bronte met with Colm?

She could feel beads of sweat running down her back, her hands and breath shaking.

Pull yourself together.

She couldn’t return to the men in this state.

Well, at least I have something...

She gripped the envelope a little tighter, staring down at it.

But why? Why, why, why, why, why...

Her mind was humming.

Stop. Stop, stop, stop. Slow down. Breathe.

She inhaled another long, slow breath before she stuffed the envelope into her purse.

She should have stayed and questioned Bronte. She should have asked him outright why the hell he’d been meeting with Colm. That’s what he’d meant about history. Not just alluding to her connection to him. Colm had told him everything, he knew everything about her, including what Dutch had done to her father. She should—

“A lovely night, isn’t it?”

Oh, Christ.

She froze, her already staggered breaths halting.

Her uncle Nicholas was only a short distance behind her, talking to a new group.

He didn’t want to find her, she knew that. Her staying missing would help push his agenda. But if he saw her now... What a show he could put on. She stayed still, staring ahead, trying to even her breathing once more.

The name ‘Albert Fraser’ wandered into her mind, bizarrely. Yes, you could turn around, keeping your face turned away and walk back into the house and try and find him... Who was he again, how was he important? No. She couldn’t go back to the house, what if someone recognised her from the description in the newspaper? She’d been damn lucky so far, but the people here, they had to read the newspapers, they had to know what was going on. Why the hell had she come.

She couldn’t think properly. She didn’t know if she wanted to be sick or faint. This was too much, it was all too much, it—

You’re getting worked up again, breathe, just breathe...

It had been such a long time since she’d been panicked to this extent. She been given plenty of cause to be panicked but anger had overshadowed it or the need to move on to the next thing but now... she just felt helpless. She had no control over anything. That terrified her more than anything.

Her uncle’s voice drifted across the lawn. “... it has been so terribly awful without her, and my sister, too. They were the joys of my life.”

Tears pricked at her eyes. She wasn’t the joy of his life. She wasn’t the joy of anyone’s life. She’d been the joy of her father’s life, he’d told her so, and he was dead, and then she’d been the joy of her brother’s life but he was dead, too, and now after that no one, she’d had to look after others before herself and she was so sick and tired of all of it, she just wanted some peace and to be cared for, she wasn’t too proud to admit it, she wanted someone to look after her, not all the time, just now, just for now, just for now when everything was dark and hopeless and...

Breathe, please just breathe...

Albert Fraser. Do something useful. Turn around and go in.

She didn’t move. She stared at the street, at the horses, carriages, people going by. It occurred to her, then.

I could join them. I could just wander onto the street, find a place to stay for the night, make a plan tomorrow, get away, get away from everyone, no one needs me, they could all live without me, they’ll all just be a memory, a story to tell in a few years time, I could—

“Miss Sawyer!”

Jolting, she turned sharply out of reflex, forgetting her uncle for a moment. She smiled automatically as Dutch emerged from the open door, beaming, Arthur, Hosea and Bill behind him.

Shit...

“Shall we leave?”

“Yes, let’s,” she answered brightly, feeling the same, oddly charged energy that had possessed her for the last few minutes running through her body as she beamed back.

The men descended the stairs, Dutch smiling, Hosea pleased, Bill irritable and Arthur... looking at her.

“Hey, you okay?” he murmured as the others continued on, he and Ada falling behind. “You walked right past me earlier.”

Shit... she’d passed Arthur, because of course she had.

“I was following someone,” she answered, her tone matching his, though a faintly manic smile lingered.

“Who?”

“A servant, that Albert guy. It didn’t lead to anything,” she waved her hand dismissively as they were handed their weapons back, the doorman smiling courteously at each of them in turn.

“Right, so you—”

“Here comes Lenny,” Dutch announced, making them all look ahead.

There he was indeed, pulling the carriage up to the front of the house. Nodding at the doorman, Dutch clapped him on the back before heading to the carriage. Ada kept her breathing steady as they let her step up first, the nervous fluttering inside her lingering.

She sat by the window on the far side, staring out of it as they climbed in.

Please calm down, please just breathe.

The corset didn’t help, restricting every deep breath she tried to take. The door closed and Lenny urged the horses into a walk, turning the carriage around. She stared out of the window still, looking up at the grand house as it came into view. She shouldn’t have come. Why had she, she could’ve just said no—

Her gaze dropped and met that of Nicholas Timmins.

Her blood went cold. He stared at her, just as frozen as she was, not listening to the elderly woman speaking to him. Then, he was gone, the carriage rolling on and the next house filling her view. She looked ahead, staring at Bill’s waistcoat as he started to grumble.

“I ain’t never felt so awkward in all my life,” he muttered, loosening his bowtie, “All them folk, all so pleased with themselves. High society’s pigeon shit. If you ask me, it’s more like torture.”

She waited for the shouts, for the calls to stop the carriage.

Tutting, Arthur reached inside his jacket and removed a document, handing it to Dutch. “Here’s them papers I took,” he said, leaning back into his seat.

“Anybody see you take this?” Dutch opened the document, glancing over it.

No shouts came.

“Don’t think so.”

“Did anyone else find anything?” she heard herself ask suddenly, looking up and between them.

Bill made an indiscernible sound, looking out of the window.

Hosea, however, nodded, speaking to her, so she assumed they’d all already conferred. “I found somethin’ about a bank that could help us.”

“A bank?” Her eyebrows rose. Fumbling with the opening of her purse, she pulled the envelope out, pausing for a second before holding it out to Dutch. “I found something about a bank, too.”

They all looked at her.

“Really?” Dutch said as he accepted the envelope, his eyes lingering on her for a moment before he turned it over and opened it.

“Yeah, I got into the Mayor’s bedroom and found it on the dresser,” she answered, clasping her hands together over her purse.

“Bedroom?” Arthur prompted, an eyebrow arched.

She shrugged her shoulders quickly, shaking her head slightly. “People hide all their personal belongings in the bedroom. And the door was locked.”

“What—”

“Annie...” Her gaze darted to Dutch as he looked up at her, almost in awe.”... this is brilliant. This is exactly what we need.”

For some reason, a reason she would never be able to discern, the manic anxiety suddenly slipped away as they all inched closer and tried to get a look at the bank plans as Dutch lowered them. Her own smile softening, she glanced up and caught Arthur’s gaze. He returned her smile, one corner of his mouth higher than the other.

“Lady and gentlemen,” Dutch chuckled, folding the map away. “Let’s go home, shall we?”

Bill grumbled his agreement as Arthur sighed.

“You can drop us at the edge of town. We gotta get our things from the hotel, and our horses.”

“They keepin’ ‘em for you?” Hosea asked.

“Nah, we had to buy the place for another night, robbin’ bastards. Our things are in our room.”

“Why don’t you stay there?”

All four of them looked at Dutch, Ada’s lips parting.

Excuse me...?

Dutch raised a hand slightly before reaching inside his jacket to retrieve a cigar. “Would be a shame to waste the money.”

Arthur shook his head. “That don’t matter—”

“No, you kids deserve a nice comfortable bed after your work tonight,” Dutch said jovially, a smile pulling at his lips as he placed the cigar between them.

“Sure,” Ada answered in the same moment Arthur said, “Righ’.”

Settling back in their seats as Dutch leaned his head out of the window to call out the plan to Lenny, Ada kept her gaze firmly out of the window.

Right...

Another evening out of camp, wonderful... Another evening alone with Arthur in a confined space where he was probably going to ask more questions...

Right...

—

The men bade them a very warm farewell as they stepped out of the carriage, pleased with what the night had offered, and grateful Bill had found a half-full bottle of champagne on the floor.

Pushing his hands into the pockets of his trousers, Arthur exhaled a breath as he watched the carriage roll away into the night. He felt Ada also release a breath beside him. Something had happened tonight. The look on her face as she’d descended the stairs had made his heart stop; it was the same expression he’d seen the first time he’d taken her into camp and had broken down. He’d wanted to follow after her, but time had been crucial at that damn party and he’d needed to find something.

He hadn’t known what to do back then, when he’d first met her, but now...

Turning to her, he pulled a hand out of his pocket, lifting it to gently place it on her back. “Ada, I—”

“Why don’t we get a drink?” She flashed him a smile before she’d turned and was gone, disappearing into the loud saloon.

His hand dropped from where it had almost reached her, his teeth gritting.

God damn it, he could have yelled right there and then.

He was tired of enigmas and questions, they were beyond that now, or at least he’d thought they were. Perhaps tonight would be the time to put all the uncertainty to rest, about everything. But... yes, a drink would do.

The saloon was rowdier than the night before, people laughing and talking loudly, drinks overflowing and spilling, and women sat on various men’s laps, an exciting poker game in full-swing.

He followed Ada to the bar, watching her as she leaned over, nearly shouting to be heard by the bartender. She ordered a bottle of whisky and two glasses, glancing up at him expectantly as the bartender placed them on the counter. Tutting quietly, he fished a few coins out of his pocket, dropping them into the other man’s hand.

Taking the bottle and glasses, she turned and surveyed the room. Finding no empty seats, she turned her head to him and said above the noise, “Let’s go upstairs.”

She was heading to the stairs before he could agree.

They had to push their way through the crowd of people, declaring ‘excuse me’ here and there. It was notably emptier on the top floor, a few women and men huddled in corners and on the couches together, though no less quieter as the noise below carried up. Passing them, Ada adjusted the bottle and glasses in her hands so she could retrieve their room key from her purse. Opening the door, she entered, placing the items in her arms down onto the bedside table.

Arthur entered a few moments behind her, glancing at her, then he removed the key from the door and closed it, locking it. He placed the key beside the glasses as she moved to the French doors, pulling the curtains across them and ignoring the waves of a few of the drunken patrons on the balcony. He watched her as she returned to the bedside table, stepping out of her way slightly, and removed the top from the bottle, pouring a good two or three inches into each glass, her purse propped beside them. Holding one out to him, he accepted it from her with a wordless nod, and she lifted her own, turning from him to move to the washbasin.

Sipping the whisky, he watched her as she took a long drink, and saw her grimace, even from this view, before placing the drink down and lifting her hands to her hair, starting to pull pins out.

She seemed... jittery.

Lowering his glass, his tongue gliding over his lips, he moved around the bed to ‘his’ side, setting the glass down on ‘his’ bedside table. Shrugging his jacket off, tossing it onto the couch beside him, he continued to watch her as he unbuttoned his waistcoat. She kept her gaze on the thick curtains, removing pin after pin and dropping them beside the basin. A curl would be released with each one she took, falling about her face and shoulders, dropping down to her waist. The waistcoat joined the jacket as did his bow tie. Sliding his braces off of his shoulders, he then rolled his sleeves up before removing his gun belt and depositing it on the couch.

He finished as she did, her hands shaking her hair out and settling it. She took another sip of whisky and he sat on the couch, leaning back and kicking his shoes off.

Then, she turned to him.

“Well, tonight was interesting.”

“Yes, it was,” he remarked, leaning over to get his glass before settling back again, balancing it on his thigh.

He thought he saw her eyes narrow just a fraction when he didn’t say anymore, but she looked away a moment after, gazing down as she lifted her skirts to toe her blue shoes off.

She continued looking at the floor, her teeth grazing over her lip.

“I think I can beat you on who had the more interesting night.”

She looked at him as she took her glass and sat on the chest at the end of the bed, one leg tucked under herself, her lips twitching wryly.

“I know what you’re doing, being coy and not talking, though maybe you know I know that and that’s the point.”

“We’re spendin’ too much time together,” he answered, his features softening a little.

She exhaled a laugh, though the smile quickly faded. She looked at the glass in her hands, and he knew she was choosing her words.

Jesus Christ, was she actually going to tell him what had rattled her without being prompted?

After a few moments, her eyes met his.

“I spoke with Bronte tonight. Alone.”

He held her gaze, not allowing a reaction just yet. “Okay.”

She shifted slightly. “I was on the upper floor, planning on finding somewhere to hide, and I’d managed to get into the Mayor’s bedroom from his office. I picked the locks.”

Of course she had.

“Someone came into the office, though, and was about to come into the bedroom so I got out of there through the bedroom door and was nearly to the stairs when a man stopped me, then Bronte called out to me, from the balcony.” Her thumb brushed against the glass. “He gave me a glass of wine, invited me to sit with him and then I very quickly realised I was there for a reason.”

Arthur stilled.

She licked her lips before continuing, “Bronte said he’d spoken with my uncle, Nicholas, and had promised to help him find me in any way he could.”

His brow dipped but she carried on, wanting the whole story out.

“He said after hearing my description from my uncle and hearing about me from his boys, from when Sadie and I had been asking questions about him, he’d asked Dutch to bring me along, probably when you, him and John had gone to get Jack. I asked him why he wanted me there and he didn’t really give a reason, but he did want me to... to give those papers with the drawings of the bank to Dutch.”

Arthur’s frown deepened. “What?”

She shrugged slightly. “Those and that I should support Dutch. He said he could see a prosperous future with Dutch and that my support would mean a lot.” She licked her lips again. “He also said... that he knew it would be hard for me to do that.”

“Why?”

Ada took a breath. “He’s met with Colm, Arthur.”

Arthur’s mouth opened as he sat up. “What the hell?”

“I know, I... He didn’t say why, he sprung that on me just as I was leaving. He gave me this, too, from Colm. My Daddy’s ring.” She held her right hand up, showing him the ring.

His gaze flicked to her finger before he shook his head as she dropped her hand. “Why the hell is Bronte meetin’ with Colm and with us?”

“I don’t know... He could be wanting to extend his reach? Want more people and therefore more power on his side? Maybe he’s considering options?” She shrugged, exhaling a long breath. “I don’t know, Arthur, he’s a man I can’t understand.”

“Why didn’t you say you’d spoken with Bronte in the carriage and that he’d given you the papers?”

“Even if I’d said that and lied through my teeth about what we’d spoken about, Dutch would still have wanted to know why Bronte wanted me alone, might even ask him when they meet again. It could have led to too many questions and suspicions.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” he murmured before taking a long sip of whisky.

She drained her own glass and swallowed hard with a grimace. Wiping her mouth with her fingers, she raised her eyebrows, her lips twitching.

“I did hear my uncle talking while I was lurking in the bedroom, my Mayor uncle that is. He was doing a very convincing job of being beside himself about my disappearance whilst also pushing his political agenda. He saw me, too.”

He stared at her, but she laughed then, with an air of bewilderment.

“What?”

“He saw me, when we were leaving. I just looked out of the carriage and there he was, looking at me as I was looking at him.” She was smiling and she didn’t know why. “He didn’t even say anything. Didn’t even call out. He doesn’t want me back, I know it, he doesn’t.”

She then laughed again and lay back on the bed, the chest level with it, resting the glass on her stomach as her other hand rubbed at her brow and closed eyes.

“Oh, Lord... Do you ever curse yourself for the times you thought life was difficult when it absolutely wasn’t and you took it all for granted?”

Arthur shifted in his seat. He didn’t know what the fuck to say to any of that. “I don’t know. My life ain’t ever been easy though.”

“Yeah, but I bet you’ve had fun,” she sighed. “I bet you’ve had times where it’s felt like it was worth it.”

He gazed at her. She wasn’t in the right state to talk about her uncles now.

“You sayin’ carryin’ me all the way back to camp wasn’t fun?”

She laughed, her hand sliding from her face to her chest as she turned her head to him, smiling.

“Ah, how could I forget one of my most treasured memories.”

“And shootin’ up that manor?”

“Oh, and then finding out a man dear to my heart had died. Ah, wonderful, wonderful memories...” Her smile lingered as she chuckled.

He arched an eyebrow, her smile infectious even as concern tugged at him. “What about takin’ that ride and killin’ those Raiders?”

She chuckled again. “Mmh, and it was raining...”

And you’d held me...

“Jack’s party was fun, too,” she added, her voice slightly lower.

One corner of his mouth lifted a little higher. “Yes, it was.”

She thought of his hands on her body, his mouth on hers, his tongue stroking...

Dangerous territory, Ada... But that had been so nice...

Pulling her gaze from his, she pushed herself up, inhaling a quick breath.

“Well, those shoes have made my feet hurt,” she announced, sitting upright. “And I could do with another glass.”

Arthur’s gaze lingered on her before he ran his hand down his mouth and stood, draining his glass. “I’ll get it.”

She lifted her glass for him to take as he passed her, dropping her now empty hand into her lap. She heard him pour whisky into their glasses as she winced and shifted.

“Christ...” she muttered, straightening her back as her constricting bodice started to become a little bit too uncomfortable.

Pushing herself up to her feet, she reached her hands behind herself, her head tipping back slightly, and searched for the line of buttons that ran down her spine. Managing to undo a few from the base to the middle of her back, she then arched, trying to reach higher.

Oh, for the love of God...

Huffing out a breath, she dropped her arms and accepted the glass Arthur offered to her, his brow arched.

“Strugglin’?”

“Mmh,” she hummed as she took a sip, swallowing quickly. “The eternal struggle of women.” Exhaling a heavy breath, she placed the glass down by the basin before her, her hands returning to their attempt at the buttons, her head back, her eyes closed. “You men have it so easy. Everything’s within reach and comfortable and easy, and we have to be contortionists and have to have assistance like children and we’re not able to breathe, and we can only eat one tiny thing otherwise the laces will burst and—”

“All right, all right, Jesus Christ, woman...” Setting his own glass down by the basin, Arthur shook his head and placed his hands on her hips, turning her back to him.

Her eyes widened as her head tipped forward and her hands dropped.

“Excuse me, can—”

“For Christ’s sake, don’t start lecturin’ me again.”

He started unhooking the rest of the buttons, pulling just a touch too roughly.

“Will you just be careful, please, this is a beautiful dress—”

“Yes, all righ’...”

Despite his grumbling, he became gentler. She exhaled a breath, her hands going to her hips. The material loosened around her shoulders and chest, prompting her to automatically raise her hand to keep it up against herself. A muffled cheer went up from the saloon below, at the poker game, probably, and she heard Arthur sigh under his breath at it.

Her lips twitched.

Then he reached the last button between her shoulder blades, his finger tips brushing against her skin.

Lord...

She stepped away, nodding.

“Thank you.” Keeping her back to him, she tugged her sleeves down her arms.

He didn’t say anything but she heard him pick his glass up, the floorboards creaking slightly as he moved somewhere. Gripping the dress at her hips, she gently eased it down, Stepping out of it, she swept it up and moved to the couch, carefully laying the dress over it. The floorboards sounded again as Arthur moved, sitting on the chest.

A trumpet sounded from somewhere a few streets over, a slow melody fitting for the time of night.

Does this city ever sleep?

Reaching her hands back once more, she found the ties that, knotted together, held her bodice tight against her body.

Begone, torture.

Pulling on a cord, the knot came undone, and she bent her arms higher to begin loosening the rest.

The floorboards creaked.

“Stop, stop... ‘bout to dislocate your damn shoulders...” Arthur murmured, brushing her hands aside.

He took over as her hands dropped, her lips twitching.

“You’re being very helpful, Mr Morgan.”

“Hate to see a damsel struggle,” he drawled.

She snorted. “Oh, really?”

“Yeah, can’t stand it.”

“You hero. Should have asked for a medal from the Mayor.”

“I did. It’s comin’ soon.”

“To Tacitus Kilgore?”

“Nope, Arthur Morgan. I want women to know it’s me lookin’ after them.”

He smiled as she laughed, comfortably able to do so as the corset loosened around her ribcage.

“On behalf of woman-kind, I thank you.”

As he tugged at the last lace, her hand went up to grip the top of the corset to stop it falling and she made to step away.

Gentle hands at her hips held her in place.

Her lips parted as she kept her gaze ahead.

“Arthur...” she breathed, a slight hitch to her tone.

“Jus’... don’t move for a second,” he murmured.

She could feel the warmth of his hands through her thin chemise. It was such a light hold. She could have pulled away if she wanted to.

“You’re in my head, Ada,” he continued after a moment, his voice so low. “I just... I know I said it the other day and I know we also said what we said but... I think about you all the time. I can’t seem to stop.”

She swallowed lightly, her chest rising and falling a little quicker.

“I like hearin’ you laugh and seein’ you happy. I think about when I was kissin’ you—”

She turned, his hands gliding around her, finding her waist. The corset fell in the process, settling at her feet. Lifting her hands, she cupped his face and rose up on her toes to capture his lips in a firm kiss. His arms immediately went tight around her, holding her as his lips moved against hers. Her body instantly reacted to him, desire coursing through her.

God, she’d only had this once but she had missed it. To hell with everything, to all of it. Who gave a fuck. Her tongue slid against his, tasting the whisky they’d shared together, much like the night they’d last and first kissed. Except this time, she wouldn’t allow any interruptions.

Breaking the kiss, her hands dropped to unbutton his shirt, her breathing ragged.

Arthur’s own breathing was rather laboured as he fisted her chemise at her hips, staring down at her.

“Shit, woman, think you could give me a warnin’ next time?” he gravelled, one corner of his mouth rising.

She glanced up at him as her own lips lifted, arching an eyebrow. “You think there’s gonna be a next time? You’re bold, Mr Morgan.”

“Oh, I’m gonna make sure there’s a next time, sweetheart...”

She gasped and her smile widened as he lifted her, her legs wrapping around his waist.

“Now this seems familiar...” he murmured, his gaze drifting over her.

“I think I’ll need reminding of a few parts,” she whispered as he stepped closer to the bed and placed his knee on it, laying her down. She sank back into the sheets as his body covered hers, holding himself up by resting his forearm above her head.

“Oh, really...”

Ada’s head tipped back as his lips descended upon her neck, her mouth dropping open with a sharp inhale. Christ, he was good, his tongue and teeth grazing over her skin and making her fingers curl into his shirt at his back.

“... remember this?”

His low words against her ear had her biting at her lower lip as she nodded.

“Vaguely...”

She felt his smile, before his arm was sliding under her, pulling her close against him as he trailed warm, open-mouthed kisses down her throat. She just about managed to suppress a moan, pulling at his shirt slightly as her eyes closed. Every inch of her skin was yearning for his touch, needed his touch to ground her, to stop her mind from spinning. Wrapping her legs around his waist, she slid her hand into his half-open shirt, gripping his shoulder, as her other pulled his shirt out of his trousers.

“Now, I don’t remember this...” His lips grazed against her jaw as he lifted his head to arch an eyebrow at her. Then he saw the fire in her eyes.

“Touch me,” she murmured, her hands now at his shirt buttons, finishing what she had started.

He didn’t need telling twice. Dipping his head, his mouth went to her chest, the neckline of her chemise low, baring the tops of her breasts. He kissed at the soft skin there, feeling her quick breaths.

Her nipples had hardened, visible through her chemise, and he lowered his mouth to one, wetting the material and gently pulling at the sensitive peak with his lips. The moan that escaped her was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. He sucked and licked at her nipple, wanting to draw more sounds from her and she didn’t disappoint, one hand suddenly in his hair, gripping and holding him in place as she moaned.

He moved his attention to her other nipple, tugging at it with his teeth as his hand moved from above her to pinch and roll her wet nipple with his fingers.

“Oh my God...” he heard her breathe as she tipped her head back, her back arching.

Heat pooled in her lower stomach, spreading down, and she desperately needed relief. Lifting her hips, she rocked them once against his thigh, and he answered with a groan. She liked that. Angling her hips, she rolled them again, and brushed against his straining erection. His mouth paused in its ministrations as his fingers pressed into her side, another, rougher, groan escaping him. She liked that very much, so she did it again, then again, picking up a slow rhythm.

From the sound of his following groans, his teeth were gritted, and he pressed his forehead against her chest. When, after a few moments, she felt his own hips start to move, she slid her hand down between their bodies and brushed her fingers down him.

He grunted and pulled his hips back suddenly.

“Wait, wait, Ada...” Pushing himself up with one hand, he gazed down at her, his other arm still resting under her, cradling her.

She blinked a few times as she focused on him, wetting her lips. “Sorry, was that not, was I not supposed to do that?”

He shook his head slightly as he tried to find the right words. “No, no, that ain’t it, I... We just can’t... I don’t think we should go the, ah, the whole way.”

She gazed at him, her eyes searching his, and the fire in her eyes started to dim. “I know, I know, I’m sorry, I just got—”

“Nah, don’t apologise, sweetheart,” he murmured, his thumb brushing along her lower lip. “I just... don’t think it’s right.”

She arched an eyebrow, her lips twitching. “You waiting until marriage?”

Or for Mary.

He snorted, his hand returning to settle beside her. “Nah, just...”

When he couldn’t find the words after a few moments, she lifted her hand and cupped his jaw, making her smile widen a little more. “It’s okay... It’s quite sensible, actually.”

He scoffed, his eyebrows raising. “That’s somethin’ I ain’t ever been called.”

“What an interesting night indeed.”

Arthur exhaled a laugh before pressing a gentle, lingering kiss to her lips, feeling her body instantly press closer to his.

Christ, woman...

Pulling back, he carefully pulled his arm out from under her and pushed off the bed, standing at the end of it.

“You want another drink?” he asked as he straightened, running a hand through his hair, gazing down at her.

Oh, Jesus...

She looked absolutely beautiful. Her curls were splayed out around her head, her skin was flushed, her chemise was pulled down, keeping the curves of her breasts visible to his appreciative gaze, and she was smiling.

“Yes, please.”

Nodding, he pulled the glass from the dresser and, deciding it did indeed need topping up, rounded the bed to the table.

Ada stared at him. He was waiting for Mary. Or marriage. Or marriage to Mary. Either way... fine. She didn’t want anything serious. Neither did he most likely... But what was stopping them from just... living in the moment? If he really, truly didn’t want this then he wouldn’t have kissed her, wouldn’t have kissed at her nipples... He might not want her, exactly, but she could live with that. She would live with that.

As he removed the stopper from the bottle, he heard her clear her throat, the sheets rustling as she sat up.

“I’ve heard there are... other things a man and woman can do to pleasure each other.”

He paused, the rim of the bottle knocking against the glass. Then he looked at her, her hands clasped in her lap.

“Is that right.”

“Yes.”

For all that she looked slightly nervous, she lifted her chin as she held his gaze. He set the glass and bottle down.

“What kind of things?”

She wet her lips. “Things that... just involve hands... and mouths.”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

She watched him as he pulled his shirt off, tossing it aside. She’d seen his bare chest before but even still she couldn’t stop her gaze from quickly travelling across his torso. Her breathing then hitched as he nodded a few times, moving back to the end of the bed, his arms folded.

“And what kind of things could I do with my hands and mouth to you?”

She was too drunk on desire and need to call him out for being the bastard that he was.

She wet her lips again. “Well... You could kiss my breasts like you were doing or you could... you could...”

He’d moved onto the bed as she spoke, leaning over her, his lips inches from hers. Lowering his hand as she trailed off, he moved it under her chemise and brushed his fingers against the seam of her drawers, eliciting a sharp gasp from her.

“Touch you here?” he murmured, stroking her again, and her back straightened as a low moan sounded from the back of her throat, her hand going to his bicep. Exhaling a breath, he pressed his fingers against her and her eyes closed. “Christ... You’re wet, sweetheart...”

She could only hum in response, her nails digging into him as he continued to stroke her through her wet drawers.

“Has anyone else ever touched you like this before?” he murmured, his curiosity getting the better of him.

Her tongue darted out over her lips as she shook her head, opening her eyes after a moment to meet his gaze.

“No,” she whispered, her cheeks flushed. “Only me.”

“And how do you like to touch yourself?”

“Arthur...” she muttered, her cheeks flushing.

“No, I ain’t sayin’ it to embarrass you, sweetheart,” he said quietly, his hand pausing. “I just wanna make it good for you.”

He was seconds away from grumbling at her features softening, when she cupped his face and pulled him closer, pressing her lips to his. He groaned as her tongue traced along the seam of his mouth, gently asking for entrance which he gladly gave. As her tongue dipped into his mouth he slid an arm around her and guided her onto her back, her head resting on the pillows. He would have been more than happy to spend the rest of the night just teasing and kissing her plump lips when he felt her hands leave his face and her body shift under his as she lifted the hem of her chemise a few inches and began to push her drawers down.

He helped her, carefully tugging them down with one hand until she kicked them off, then her hand was on his.

“I like it gentle,” she murmured so quietly against his lips as she slid his hand under her chemise and he touched the wet lips of her cunt.

Her hips bucked slightly as she inhaled a sharp breath and the kiss paused, both of them just focused on the feeling. His middle finger slowly slid up her slit, gathering her wetness, and she made a sound akin to a keen as he circled that bundle of nerves that seemed to serve no other purpose than to give pleasure.

Arthur could do gentle. He could do slow. He could do both until the end of days if it meant he got to watch her like this; her head tipped back, one hand on his forearm, the other his shoulder, her lips parted, her breaths ragged. His only qualm was that he wanted to give more. Drawing his arm out from under her, he caressed her hip as he ran two fingers up and down her slit, taking the time every time to rub the spot that prompted the loudest moans from her. Lowering his head, he then began to trail kisses down the curve of her soft, round stomach, moving down as he went until he was settled between her spread legs.

Ada eyes snapped open, her gaze darting down, and she made an involuntary moan at the sight of him.

Oh, sweet Lord...

A corner of his mouth lifted as their eyes locked and she didn’t think she could breathe for a moment. Then his tongue swept up her folds.

“Oh holy God...” The curse tumbled from her lips before she could stop it, her eyes widening as her stomach muscles tightened.

His low, answering chuckle made her hips buck, and his hands circled under her thighs to settle on her stomach, holding her down. He traced his tongue along her pussy, dragging another moaned curse from her.

“This what you heard about, sweetheart?” he murmured, his deep voice vibrating against her so deliciously.

“Didn’t, hmh... didn’t know it would be this good...” she breathed, her hands moving from her shoulders to her stomach, to the bedsheets, unsure of what to do with them.

She then gripped at the sheets as his tongue lapped at her cunt in long, rhythmic strokes. Her teeth instinctively sank into her lower lip to muffle her loud moans as her eyes closed.

“... I want to hear you...”

God, his voice. Had he always had such a delectable voice? Had she just not noticed or had she not wanted to? And those words...

“... Get out of your head... Lemme hear you...”

A moan from the back of her throat sounded. She felt his fingers press into her skin slightly and his tongue started to move a little faster. Releasing a long breath, she didn’t care that it sounded like a whine. The feel of his stubble rubbing against her skin didn’t even bother her, she liked it.

Then he sucked at the sensitive bud. Crying out, she couldn’t stop her hand from moving to his head, her fingers gripping at his hair. He groaned at that, sucking a little harder before he licked at her again, alternating his ministrations that had her mewling and rolling her hips up.

His gaze flicked up to her. Christ, if he thought she looked good before... Shifting slightly, he moved a hand from her stomach to her folds and slid a finger inside her. Jesus Christ, she was warm and wet and tight and... Fuck... The gasp she gave and the tightening of her slick walls around him had his already straining cock begging for relief.

He moved his finger, slowly fucking her with it. Both of her hands were on his head now, her fingers twisting into his hair and, hell, even that felt good. He could feel her hips jerking under his arm which he’d now lain across her stomach, wanting to buck and writhe. She was so wet he could easily slip a second finger inside her, moving them as one.

Jesus, what would it feel like to slide his cock into her, to fuck her and have her wet around him—

No, no, he couldn’t do that, shouldn’t even torment himself thinking about that. This was enough.

“Arthur...”

Her moan of his name, it never sounding so sweet, had him looking up again, meeting her gaze. Her cheeks were flushed and her breaths were ragged; she was close, and he wanted nothing more than to see her tumble over the edge.

Her finger tips were brushing against his cheek, her eyes half-lidded. “Kiss me, Arthur.”

He surged up, bracing an arm by her head as his lips descended upon hers. She moaned against his lips, cupping his face and holding him close as his fingers continued to move inside her, his thumb pressing against the swollen bud. He felt her start to clench around his fingers and her lips broke from his as she cried out.

“That’s it, Ada... Let go, that’s it...” he murmured, drawing his head back to watch her.

Tilting her head back, all she could and wanted to focus on was the pleasure coursing through her, building and taking hold. Then, he curled his fingers inside her and brushed his thumb across the bud. Her release consumed her as her back arched, her head spinning now for an entirely different reason, cries tumbling from her lips.

“Oh, God, Arthur...”

He couldn’t take his eyes off of her. Her blunt nails sank into his shoulders as her head rolled to the side, her hips rising off the bed. She looked like an angel, he thought, she looked so damn beautiful. He kissed down her neck, across her shoulder, chest. He wrapped his lips around her nipple, sucking lightly as he gradually slowed his fingers, wanting to prolong her pleasure as much as he could. It wasn’t until he felt her fingers wrapping around his wrist, pulling slightly, that he stopped completely, pressing a kiss to her chest.

Ada hummed quietly as his fingers carefully withdrew from her. Her hand remained on his, though, and he lifted it, her fingers, without even being aware of it, lacing with his as he settled their hands on the bed. Kissing the corner of her mouth, he inhaled a long breath.

“Got you quiet now, huh, it’s nice when you ain’t givin’ me shit...”

She laughed, her eyes opening a moment after as she stretched her legs out, contentment spreading through her. “Shut your mouth, Arthur Morgan.”

“All righ’...”

His lips on hers muffled her laugh, her arms wrapping around his neck. It was a soft kiss and they both let it linger.

God, he could get used to this.

Their kiss quickly ended, however, when he felt her hand at the waistband of his trousers.

“Ada...” He pulled back a little, holding himself up over her. “... You don’t—”

“I want to,” she murmured, her other hand on the back of his neck. “Please. Let me.”

He sighed quietly. “Ada—”

“Let me.”

Her fingers brushed against the front of his trousers and his jaw tightened.

Christ...

He nodded. Tilting her chin up, she pressed an open-mouthed kiss to his jaw and his eyes closed. He felt her unbuttoning his trousers, counting each one in his mind. There were only three but time, it felt, stretched between each of them. Then, her fingers were on his cock. He exhaled a short, sharp breath, his teeth gritting. Her touch was so light, so gentle. He didn’t deserve the tenderness of it but, Lord, he wasn’t about to stop her.

Her hand was suddenly on his shoulder, making his eyes open.

“What is it? Do you want to st—”

“Turn over.”

“What?”

She grazed her teeth over her lower lip, unsuccessfully hiding her smile. “Turn over, please. On to your back.”

“Why—”

“Because I said so.”

He didn’t want to argue. He shifted off of her and on to his back, adjusting his head on the pillows. She turned on to her side, her finger tips running up his arm furthest from her. His jaw moved slightly. She traced over the scar at his shoulder the O’Driscoll’s had given him before her fingers glided across his chest. They continued on down, past other, smaller scars, through the hair that covered his chest, down his stomach.

He swallowed as he watched her and she watched her hand. He barely breathed as she explored and he didn’t want to speak, didn’t want to break whatever plan she had or her curiosity. Then she reached the waistband of his trousers. In a matter of seconds her light fingers were dipping inside. A final proposal that she didn’t have to died on his tongue when she slid her fingers around his aching cock.

He sucked in a breath as she withdrew him from the confines of his trousers, freeing him. His cock was painfully hard, and her fingers flexed around him as she adjusted to the weight, eliciting a hiss from him. He had no words, watching her, waiting. He then realised she was waiting, too, no, not waiting, pausing, considering.

“It helps...” Her gaze rose to meet his as he spoke, having to pause to clear his throat. “... It helps if your hand’s a little wet.”

Her lips twitching, she then opened her mouth and licked her palm. The sight of her tongue made his fingers curl into the bedsheets.

Lord, he was acting like a boy who’d never known the touch of a woman... when was the last time he had? Hell, he couldn’t remember, he didn’t want to remember,

He thought he saw the ghost of a smile before she wrapped her fingers around him and moved her wet palm up and down languidly, curiously. The groan he released had a hiss to it, his eyes falling shut.

Christ...

He just felt. Felt her light, gentle touch caressing him, the soothing pleasure that stretched throughout his body. She was exploring, using her palm, then the tips of her fingers, then he felt... Fuck, then he felt her tongue...

He breathed out the curse as she touched and circled her tongue around his tip tentatively, her finger tips still stroking the length of him. He wanted to see her face, lose himself in her blue eyes, she’d probably smile, too, and it’d be so good, but he didn’t want to demand anything of her, ask any more of her, in fact, he...

He couldn’t.

“Hey...” His hand found her cheek, stroking lightly, and he only opened his eyes when he felt her pull back, knowing it would break his resolve if he saw her between his knees and...

Clearing his throat, he found her gaze, a corner of his mouth lifting slightly at her frown of confusion.

“I can’t, I...”

“Did you not like it?”

Her quiet voice almost broke his heart.

“No, no, I, I did, but I...” He licked his lips. How could he even begin to explain? “I...”

She was just looking up at him with a beautiful, open expression, but he just couldn’t.

“... I wanna taste you again.”

She blinked, her lips parting a little wider. That softened his smile.

“... But you just—”

“Please, sweetheart.” He was asking for so much more than was being said. He didn’t know if she’d understand that as she gazed at him.

Then, a smirk pulled at her lips as she placed her hands on his knees and pushed herself up, her mouth nearing his. “How could I say no to that, you hero?”

“For Christ’s sake, woman...”

A wide smile spread across her lips as he caught her around the waist, turned them and lay her back on the bed. She threw her head back, her fingers tangling into his hair as she lost herself to the sensations of him, him, him.

—

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#arthur morgan #rdr2 #arthur morgan x original female character #arthur morgan x female oc #red dead redemption 2 #my writing #flamehairedwritings #pls read this series #even if u don't know rdr2 #if u like my writing u'll like this #take a chance on me #honey i'm still free

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llantano · 4 years

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Turning Leaves, 18. Speculation

Viki was at home with Charlie when the doorbell rang. Charlie had been hoping for the phone to ring and did not like that someone was at the door. “Well, now, who could that be?” “I’ll get it,” Viki insisted, concerned. Charlie waited, hovering near the telephone until he saw Bo and Nora enter the foyer. “Any news?” he asked before he even offered a hello.

“We just wanted to stop by and check in,” Bo offered as an encouraging apology. “You know that if I hear anything before you do, you’ll be the first person I call.” Nora hugged Viki. “Clint wanted to be here but he’s caught in a meeting at B.E. right now. He’ll call later.” “How is Matthew?” Viki ushered them to the couch. “Oh, you know … still as Buchanan as ever,” was Nora’s only explanation. “Are you two sure you’re alright? Working from home today?” “Yes, we thought a quiet setting seemed more productive. We’re fine,” Viki assured. Bo wasn’t certain. “It’s just we know you both have a lot on your mind right now, with the election and everything….” “To be honest, Bo,” Viki admitted, “the election is the least of my concerns right now.” Nora wondered with a smirk, “You mean Dorian is the least of your concerns right now?” “That too,” Viki agreed. “Although she would prefer otherwise.” “I don’t know, Viki.” Nora shook her head. “You know she’s been waiting for a perfect opportunity to hold her head up and strike.” She mimicked the movement of a snake with her hand and arm. “Well, then, let her,” Viki insisted. “It won’t do her public image any favors.” Charlie was helpless. He glanced at the phone and Bo caught him doing it. “See, the thing is,” Bo offered, “that while she may be the least of your worries right now – and rightly so, rightly so,” he nodded, “she is also the one you can deal with.” “What are you getting at, Bo?” Charlie wondered. “The interim mayor is pretty much in a holding position until we get a new mayor in town hall. This is about the first time in years we’ve been able to do our jobs at the station without someone from the mayor’s office running interference. At the end of this election, I’m going to have a new boss, and it just remains to be seen what might happen in a situation like the one we’re facing right now, with Jared.” Viki looked over at Charlie while he nodded his understanding. “Well, to be fair,” she offered, “I have to give Dorian some credit. I don’t think either one of us would interfere in an investigation like this one.” “Ah, the key words,” Nora insisted. “'Like this one.’” There was an awkward silence between the four as they each wondered over their own thoughts on the matter. Bo spoke up again. “By the way, Viki – this is relevant to your interests. The hotline got an anonymous tip this morning … from someone who was insisting that we should investigate the current hospital chief of staff because they said he has or had close personal ties with the former mayor.” Nora nodded with a funny all-knowing grin. “Well, isn’t that convenient?” Charlie wondered. “That’s true though,” Viki agreed. “In fact, now that I think about it, I’m surprised he managed to slip under all of our radars for so long, considering that prescriptions were a large part of the drug operation.” “So this is a concern to you?” Bo asked with genuine interest. “In fact, yes,” Viki nodded. She looked at Nora’s expression. “Why?” “I listened to the call,” Bo admitted. “The anonymous caller had a very familiar voice.” Viki slapped the top of her leg. “I knew it! I knew she was doing this. I was just telling Charlie -- the chief of staff position is why she even got involved in Lowell’s campaign to start with.” “Because he was on the board?” Bo asked. “Yes, and he wouldn’t vote for her becoming chief of staff due to his ties with the current one … which I’m sure involved campaign contributions … and since we’re on the subject, perhaps even drugs?” They shared a collective sigh. Viki paused. “Again, to be fair, that is exactly why I decided to run for mayor as well.” “Because Dorian was supporting him?” Nora blinked. “Oh, goodness no,” Viki shook her head. “In fact, we didn’t even find out she was his campaign manager until after the decision was made. But she did help me realize that someone had to at least try to defeat Lowell.” “And she was the first to defend him. That’s rich.” Bo smirked. “But to her credit, she did get him to resign.” “And how did she get him to do that?” Charlie wondered. “Well, you know what?” Bo offered. “To me, that doesn’t matter as much as the end result. We’re finally going to have a new mayor.” He smiled at Viki. “And I’m able to do my job. Lowell’s behind bars….” “…And Dorian’s a lesbian,” Nora grinned with glee as Viki rolled her eyes. “Speaking of … does David still wander in here from time to time?” “Oh, yes he does,” Viki assured her. “Often. Usually on a mission.” “A Dorian-commissioned mission?” Nora smirked. “Well, you know as well as I do that there is no way this lesbian thing is even - by the widest stretch of the imagination - genuine,” Nora stated. “And yet,” Viki observed, “There really is no way to prove that or even insist upon it without aggravating the gay community – which, by the way, I still have somewhat solid support from.” “The reason I ask about David,” Nora elaborated, “… Does he still have feelings for her?” Viki smirked. “David’s sentimentality only goes so far as his libido, and yet, Dorian and David will always share a connection I don’t even want to start to contemplate.” Bo nodded agreement. “It’s sort-of tragic, you know?” Nora considered. “She divorced him – despite the fact that he was a Buchanan – presumably to be with Ray Montez. You remember how crazy she got after he left town.” “How could I forget?” Viki half-shuddered, and half-smirked. “And that happened right before all of this mayor interest came up.” “Then David comes back to town and gets caught up in this lesbian farce. She demotes him to make Amelia her campaign manager. You know this all has to be making him crazy.” Bo was a bit uncomfortable with the conversation. “I’m sure it is.” Viki was curious. “Where are you going with this, Nora?” “Well, I mean … maybe you can’t prove Dorian isn’t a lesbian right now….” “…But David can,” Viki knew. “... And he listens to you, and good ol’ Pa here,” Nora nudged Bo’s arm as she teased him. “I can’t believe you’ve had this ace up your sleeve this whole time and it hasn’t occurred to you to use it.” “Well, no offense to you, Nora, but I like to think I’m a bit bigger than that. Dorian plays in the mud and taunts me to get in with her, but I’d rather stand outside the ring and watch her make a ridiculous mess of herself for no reason. Case in point -- the LGLA.” “On the other hand,” Bo thought it out for them with startling reality, “While I would never presume that Viki doesn’t have a leg up in this election, we have Dorian on the other side with a pretty fair shot to be our next mayor – and under what we all assume to be a false pretense. You wouldn’t exactly have to get in the mud for her to look dirty all on her own.” “You’re encouraging this, Bo?” Viki gasped. “I’m just saying … there would be nothing dishonest about reminding David and Dorian of their deep-seated feelings for each other.” “I take it you’re not voting for Dorian then?” Charlie asked Bo, half-joking, and they all shared a chuckle over it. “Well, you’re right,” Viki acquiesced. “There would be nothing dishonest about it. I just can’t help feeling a bit guilty at the thought that Dorian can be so easily manipulated. For goodness sakes, she had a fit over The Banner publishing an article about Jared.” “What does that have to do with anything?” Bo asked. “It’s a … conflict of interests,” Charlie explained. “She was spouting some nonsense about media bias.” Nora snapped her fingers. “And that’s why she wanted to remain anonymous on the tip hotline.” Charlie couldn’t help his own observations. “I just wish someone had a tip about Jared.” “It’ll happen soon,” Bo assured him. “This whole chain of events has unraveled so fast….” Charlie nodded. They sat in respectful silence for a moment. Viki changed the subject, hoping to ease Charlie’s mind again. “You remember what Dorian said at her initial press conference?” “You mean when she hijacked the mic after Bo’s press conference?” Charlie clarified. Viki smirked. “She said, ‘I will never betray your trust … and I will always uphold your faith in American democracy.’ The sad thing is that she meant every word of that at the time.” “And then the LGLA knocked on your door instead of hers,” Charlie observed. Viki looked to Bo. She knew he understood what she was getting at. He nodded and muttered, “Easily manipulated.” “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Viki asked him. “Do you want to lock the election?” Bo answered. “I have a confession,” Nora smirked. She leaned forward as they looked at her. “I ordered a couple of wedding pictures I will never hang on my wall. I keep them tucked away just to remind myself of what an ass Dorian made of herself that day.” Viki was stunned. “You ordered wedding pictures of Dorian?” “Granted, at the time it was not cool,” Nora clarified, motioning with one hand, “But now when I look back I’m a little amused by it. First of all, she did it to herself. Second, imagine if she knew I had those pictures.” Bo was calm as he asked, “You weren’t thinking of feeding those pictures to the press?” Nora straightened her face into innocence and looked to each of them in turn. Her tone revealed that she was not sincere when she told them, “The thought hadn’t even occurred to me.” Viki couldn’t help but grin in amusement. Nora was entertaining. She elected to not respond one way or the other on the matter of the wedding pictures. Bo changed the subject again. “You know there’s something I never did get about that Ray Montez guy.” He met the curious gazes of those around him. “He was in prison, he tried to take Langston from Dorian. I mean, Dorian was mad enough at the guy she was ready to do away with him even when she knew Clint was behind his coming here, and in a way, she could have even blamed him for her losing B.E. back to the family. Dorian married David just to get the Buchanan name back – you remember?” Nora and Viki shared a look. “How could we forget?” “You know – at least at the time – that was one of Dorian’s top priorities. She even went Buddhist over the whole thing.” “Yeah. Right,” Viki smirked. “But then,” Bo elaborated, “She’s going out on a date with Ray Montez? And after he leaves, does she get back with David? No. What the heck happened?” “She realized she was a lesbian,” Nora joked. “I don’t know,” Viki offered, “But if there is one thing I’ve learned over the years as far as Dorian is concerned, it is that if it doesn’t make sense, she’s probably up to something.” Viki looked over at Charlie, who seemed as concerned about what Dorian was up to as he did about Jared. That was wrong. She winked at him as she laced her fingers through his and squeezed his hand. Bo nodded. “Well, we have more important things to figure out than Dorian’s machinations at the moment. And we will,” he promised Charlie. Viki looked at Nora. She thought of asking her to leave the wedding pictures alone but decided to keep her attention on Charlie for the moment.

#One Life to Live #oltl #fanfic #oltl fanfic #Bo Buchanan #Nora Buchanan #Viki Banks #Victoria Lord #Charlie Banks #election storyline #A/U #a/u fanfic #OLTL a/u #Dorian Lord #Jared Banks #Ray Montez #Clint Buchanan #David Vickers #David Vickers Buchanan

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mydearsaddiary · 4 years

Text

Little curiosity notes: Hey guys! We’re on chapter 9 now! If everything goes according to plan the story will end in the next chapter! I might do an additional short epilogue after, but the plan is only to continue until chapter 10! Thank you so much for reading until here and as always: Feel free to reach out!

Thank you!

Candy (08/20/2020)

Neil Chapter 9 part 1- First, do no harm

1933

-Cliff- I said as I walked from the back room of the diner I helped to manage now- you’re running low on soda, you know!

-Geez- He said, finishing up cleaning a table and running towards me- I’m awful with this inventory stuff ya know, MC. Mind seeing everything we’re missing?

I smiled, gently hitting him on the head with the papers I was holding- Glad to help.

-Neil coming in today? Just got his new bourbon stash this morning!

-Im sure he’ll pop by later when the nanny is home. How’s everything going with you?

-It’s fine, me and Jane just moved in together- He crossed his arms , blushing a little and giving me that big smile of his.

-So you finally settled down. Next thing you know you’ll have little Conways running around the place

-Maybe in a few years- He turned around when somebody called his name- Alright, duty calls. Have fun in there!

-I always have- I waved at him and returned the back room to count our stock, manage prices, and do basically everything I did at the Ice Box. I enjoyed doing the same job alongside the same people without having the risk. Our past evolved into a better future than most of what the other mob bosses had.

Suddenly, I heard the lock click. My initial shock soon turned into dark memories I wanted to forget. Impulsively I tried open the door only to find out I was actually locked in

-Hey...! Hey!- I knocked on the door- Hey, let me out! Somebody locked me in- I wasn’t scared of enclosed places. It was the sound of the lock clicking and the inability to open it from the inside that haunted me.

I hated being locked in.

-MC- The door opened after a few knocks. Vince was there- Sorry, just came in and thought somebody left it open

-It’s alright-My cheeks were colored red, but besides that I kept my posture- I’ll just do the inventory outside

1926

I opened my eyes, waking up from my sleep. I could feel no sign of light besides the faint, artificial one. I sighed heavily realizing nothing had changed. In my new found experience, not being in the sun for three weeks messes with you head. It makes you tired and empty. A crippling force tells you to accept your fate to remain there.

I sat up, only to find Vera already awake on the mattress besides mine- Did you check the day today?- I asked

-Yeah. The holidays are approaching fast. How are you?

I rubbed my stomach which now had started to show more. Vera had asked the mayor, in one of the times he came in, for new clothes. She had some in the bedroom they used to share. It was refreshing to say the least and her clothes, that were slightly bigger on me, helped me hide my condition from him. It was a light and loose salmon colored shirt that went down until my hip, and a beige skirt that went to my calf, along with white stockings. It was nothing I’d normally wear, but I wasn’t in the position to be picky.

-I feel fine- I said- I don’t feel too sick anymore. I haven’t gotten any movements yet

-How far along are you?

-Hm... I went to the doctor last month... Must be around 13 or 14 weeks.

-It’s still early. Mine didn’t move until about 17 weeks

I looked at her, genuinely surprised- You have kids?

-Oh yes, Frank and I have our children. They’re all grown and moved on to different parts of the country. My oldest one is a little older than you.

-What’s her name?

-His, actually. His name is Robert. He’s 21 now, he got a job out west and comes back to visit when he can.

-Who are the others?

-Oh, May is 18. She’s with her aunt in Florida. I sent her when things got too complicated here. She wouldn’t listen to us.

I chuckled- I know how she feels.

-Then there’s Matt. He’s 16.

-What’s going on with Matt?

-He’s in New York as an apprentice to his grandfather. My ex-husband’s dad. He wants to teach him how to run the business he owns

-Seems like they’ve got it all figured out

-Yes. Well, I know the feeling of having your first kid. I was but a bit older than you are right now. Although- She pointed to her surroundings- I had a more adequate stay

I laughed, but there was no humor in my voice- Adler’s gonna bring our city down under his total power if we don’t do something

-You don’t think your men are trying to save you or figure it out?

-Trying is the key word. Vince...-I sighed, with a heavy heart- Well, Adler shot him... He must be dead right now. That means Cliff and Uncle Charlie must be a mess. On top of it, for my uncle, there’s the fact that I disappeared. That also messes with Neil who, I can’t even imagine what he must be feeling but it’s nothing good. Then Donovan isn’t close enough with them to put everybody’s head together. Julius, Cleo, Sofia and Andrew... Im sure they’re trying to help but...- I sighed- I’m the head of the Ice Box. Im the queen on the chess board. They need me- I said as I realized it myself- I can’t spend any more time waiting for something to happen or counting days.

-You already tried everything, remember?

-Not everything- I got up, exercising my need to move my legs- You know Adler’s schedule better than anyone. When is he out for a long time?

-He’s always at the office from noon to six on weekdays.

-Then thats our time to escape. We’ll wait an hour just to be sure, then leave.

-Yes, but you’re leaving out the important part— How are we gonna leave?

-Last night, before I went to bed, I was looking around your things to see if I could find something useful

-You went through my stuff?!-She said visibly irritated

-If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have found this- I opened my hand to show her the few bobby pins I had in my possession

-How is pinning your hair up helping us?

-Oh Vera, dig a little deeper. It’s for opening the door. I can pick it!

-With those? I think you might be a little too optimistic

-Thankfully- I said cheering up- I had plenty of training sneaking back in my house, and hiding from Momma and Poppa. I have yet to meet a lock that could stop me.

She looked at me for a few seconds and sighed- Alright, I’ll bite. One in the afternoon then.

-Thats right!-I hid it once I heard the door open. They were bringing breakfast down.

____

We heard Adler leave. We heard everything until there was nothing else to hear. The anticipation was so overwhelming that when Vera’s little clock hit twelve-thirty, we were on out way up the stairs.

I got two bobby pins and started to work on unlocking the door. In a few minutes, it clicked and it opened right up to the now dark living room

-You know- She whispered- For the three weeks you were here, you could’ve tried that sooner.

-I didn’t know you had these!- I whispered too, but in an angrier tone- And you’re welcome!

I pushed the door out slowly, as if someone would head. The dark immensity of the house spread before my eyes. Without a single soul there it seemed peaceful, but in a way that unsettled you, like something was waiting to jump out from the dark. The negativity soon disappeared as I got lost in my thoughts for a second and walked over to the big window, letting the sun hit my face. The warmth of the natural light, warmed up my heart along with it. The joy of finally breaking free made me forget for an instant I had to walk out the front door.

-Miss Granger, let’s go!-Vera hurried me up

-Yeah, right- I walked up to the front of the house. By the door there was a table. I noticed keys on top of it- This is for his Ford, isn’t it?- I grabbed them-Nifty! We just got out escape vehicle

-I can’t drive- She looked at me uncertain

-Well, I’ve been learning- I replied opening the door- Now, let’s scram

___

I had to go through two Fords to find the one the keys belonged too, within myself we could taste the flavor of freedom.

Opening the door, I made my way in. It was then everything was ruined by a single shot that went right through the window on my side. When I looked back, Adler stood a few yards away with a gun aimed in my direction, along with his two goons.

-Go, Vera! Inside!-I yelled at the top of my lungs closing my door and turning on the car. I stepped on the gas and went as fast as the car would allow me to.

Soon, down the streets of Chicago we went. The bright sun and the streets filled with people would normally be cause for celebration, but my currently situation prevented me from enjoying it. I heard more shots coming our way and noticed that Adler was following us in his own car

To make everything better, Vera was freaking out in the passenger seat

-Woaaaaaaaaah, be careeeful! Waaaait, you’re going tooooo faaaaast!

-Vera!- I yelled back, driving and swerving as much as my experience would allow- If I don’t drive fast he’s gonna catch up to us—Ah!- I yelped when another shot came right in between us, making a hole in the windshield

-You’re gonna kills uuuus!-Her voice got louder and more annoying- I’m not ready to die!- She continued, letting out her “Oh!”s And “Oh my god!”s And her loud screams that were worse than the shots for me. At this point, I tried my best to ignore them since our lives depended on it

She yelled even louder when his car bumped into our rear and sent our bodies forward. I heard continuous shots that shattered our windows and I couldn’t go any faster. I had to think of something quickly, but all the stimulation from the outside made the task harder.

That’s when I saw it and hope ushered back into me. The little red convertible from the corner of my eyes, driving right ahead of us. Vince drove with ease on the wheel, while, surprisingly, our most experienced shooter, Donovan, fired back in the mayor’s direction from the passenger seat.

Seeing them, I let out a relieved little laugh. Fear was substituted with the urge to go faster, so I gained some distance on them. On the other side the trusty green Studebaker had Cliff, Uncle Charlie and Julius in it. Cliff drove, Uncle tried to steal glances my way, and Julius had a pistol, and helped Donovan by firing back. Sometimes Vince would keep one hand on the wheel and use pearl to fire as well. What I thought was going to be hell quickly turned into an exhilarating thrill.

And then, time slowed down as a third car showed up. The darker colored vehicle that belong not just to any man, but to the man I had longed to see all this time— Neil Dresner. I recognized the car but I couldn’t see him since he drove ahead of me. It might seem silly, but the importance of that moment couldn’t be just understood, it had to be felt. The whole world brightened up again just to know he was near. I knew then I wasn’t alone, and I never would be again.

And then everything came back to me in a second, when Vera’s shouting became deafening and another shot came right by us

-We’re going to die! Jesus!- She kept having her panic attacks

-MC!-I heard a voice from Vince in his car- To the docks! Go to the docks!

I nodded, better now that I had a direction in mind,so I sped up towards my new destination.

The city passed by us in a blur, I didn’t allow myself to focus on anything else but getting there. I’m sure everyone else had a plan and in my mind I started formulating the beginning of my own.

I turned into the road that led to the docks and swerving the car faster than it could handle, I stopped abruptly, hitting a few of the many giant boxes piled around, ready to be transported. The side of the car caved in, but we came out unscathed in the front

-What are you thinking?! We could have died! We could hav-

-Vera!- I yelled, looking at her, panting. The adrenaline hadn’t left my body and I knew it wouldn’t for a long time- you’re a chatter-mag bitch- I said in an unusual calm tone, still trying to catch my breath

-Excuse me?-She gave me that look she usually did when she disapproved of something

I was going to reply, but then I heard a car and shots again- Go Vera! Out of the car!- I pushed her out her way and pulled her to hide behind the boxes laid out nearby.

I heard more tires and assumed my gang had arrived to rescue us. I smiled realizing I was right when I saw Vince throwing me my trusty revolver- Let’s take car of em, boss.

-Don’t call me that- I grabbed it, feeling an immense power I hadn’t felt in a long time. I pointed it to my target, my enemies, those who sided with Adler...

...And fired.

Part 2: https://mydearsaddiary.tumblr.com/post/627009903803990016/speakeasy-tonight-fanfic-neil-season-3-chapter-10

#voltage usa #speakeasy tonight #voltage amemix #voltage inc #voltage #voltage games #lovestruck #lovestruck voltage #neil dresner #vince moretti

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didanawisgi · 4 years

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CAN WE PULL BACK FROM THE BRINK?

Sam Harris, June 18, 2020

In this episode of the podcast, Sam discusses the recent social protests and civil unrest, in light of what we know about racism and police violence in America.

This is a transcript of a recorded podcast.

“OK…. Well, I’ve been trying to gather my thoughts for this podcast for more than a week—and have been unsure about whether to record it at all, frankly.

Conversation is the only tool we have for making progress, I firmly believe that. But many of the things we most need to talk about, seem impossible to talk about.

I think social media is a huge part of the problem. I’ve been saying for a few years now that, with social media, we’ve all been enrolled in a psychological experiment for which no one gave consent, and it’s not at all clear how it will turn out. And it’s still not clear how it will turn out, but it’s not looking good. It’s fairly disorienting out there. All information is becoming weaponized. All communication is becoming performative. And on the most important topics, it now seems to be fury and sanctimony and bad faith almost all the time.

We appear to be driving ourselves crazy. Actually, crazy. As in, incapable of coming into contact with reality, unable to distinguish fact from fiction—and then becoming totally destabilized by our own powers of imagination, and confirmation bias, and then lashing out at one other on that basis.

So I’d like to talk about the current moment and the current social unrest, and its possible political implications, and other cultural developments, and suggest what it might take to pull back from the brink here. I’m going to circle in on the topics of police violence and the problem of racism, because that really is at the center of this. There is so much to talk about here, and it’s so difficult to talk about. And there is so much we don’t know. And yet, most people are behaving as though every important question was answered a long time ago.

I’ve been watching our country seem to tear itself apart for weeks now, and perhaps lay the ground for much worse to come. And I’ve been resisting the temptation to say anything of substance—not because I don’t have anything to say, but because of my perception of the danger, frankly. And if that’s the way I feel, given the pains that I’ve taken to insulate myself from those concerns, I know that almost everyone with a public platform is terrified. Journalists, and editors, and executives, and celebrities are terrified that they might take one wrong step here, and never recover.

And this is really unhealthy—not just for individuals, but for society. Because, again, all we have between us and the total breakdown of civilization is a series of successful conversations. If we can’t reason with one another, there is no path forward, other than violence. Conversation or violence.

So, I’d like to talk about some of the things that concern me about the current state of our communication. Unfortunately, many things are compounding our problems at the moment. We have a global pandemic which is still very much with us. And it remains to be seen how much our half-hearted lockdown, and our ineptitude in testing, and our uncoordinated reopening, and now our plunge into social protest and civil unrest will cause the Covid-19 caseload to spike. We will definitely see. As many have pointed out, the virus doesn’t care about economics or politics. It only cares that we keep breathing down each other’s necks. And we’ve certainly been doing enough of that.

Of course, almost no one can think about Covid-19 right now. But I’d just like to point out that many of the costs of this pandemic and the knock-on effects in the economy, and now this protest movement, many of these costs are hidden from us. In addition to killing more than 100,000 people in the US, the pandemic has been a massive opportunity cost. The ongoing implosion of the economy is imposing tangible costs, yes, but it is also a massive opportunity cost. And now this civil unrest is compounding those problems—whatever the merits of these protests may be or will be, the opportunity costs of this moment are staggering. In addition to all the tangible effects of what’s happening—the injury and death, the lost businesses, the burned buildings, the neighborhoods that won’t recover for years in many cities, the educations put on hold, and the breakdown in public trust of almost every institution—just think about all the good and important things we cannot do—cannot even think of doing now—and perhaps won’t contemplate doing for many years to come, because we’ll be struggling to get back to that distant paradise we once called “normal life.”

Of course, normal life for many millions of Americans was nothing like a paradise. The disparities in wealth and health and opportunity that we have gotten used to in this country, and that so much of our politics and ways of doing business seem to take for granted, are just unconscionable. There is no excuse for this kind of inequality in the richest country on earth. What we’re seeing now is a response to that. But it’s a confused and confusing response. Worse, it’s a response that is systematically silencing honest conversation. And this makes it dangerous.

This isn’t just politics and human suffering on display. It’s philosophy. It’s ideas about truth—about what it means to say that something is “true.” What we’re witnessing in our streets and online and in the impossible conversations we’re attempting to have in our private lives is a breakdown in epistemology. How does anyone figure out what’s going on in the world? What is real? If we can’t agree about what is real, or likely to be real, we will never agree about how we should live together. And the problem is, we’re stuck with one other.

So, what’s happening here?

Well, again, it’s hard to say. What is happening when a police officer or a mayor takes a knee in front of a crowd of young people who have been berating him for being a cog in the machinery of systemic racism? Is this a profound moment of human bonding that transcends politics, or is it the precursor to the breakdown of society? Or is it both? It’s not entirely clear.

In the most concrete terms, we are experiencing widespread social unrest in response to what is widely believed to be an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at the black community by racist cops and racist policies. And this unrest has drawn a counter-response from law enforcement—much of which, ironically, is guaranteed to exacerbate the problem of police violence, both real and perceived. And many of the videos we’ve seen of the police cracking down on peaceful protesters are hideous. Some of this footage has been unbelievable. And this is one of many vicious circles that we must find some way to interrupt.

Again, there is so much to be confused about here. We’ve now seen endless video of police inflicting senseless violence on truly peaceful protesters, and yet we have also seen video of the police standing idly by while looters completely destroy businesses. What explains this? Is there a policy that led to this bizarre inversion of priorities? Are the police angry at the protesters for vilifying them, and simultaneously trying to teach society a lesson by letting crime and mayhem spread elsewhere in the city? Or is it just less risky to collide with peaceful protesters? Or is the whole spectacle itself a lie? How representative are these videos of what’s actually going on? Is there much less chaos actually occurring than is being advertised to us?

Again, it’s very hard to know.

What’s easy to know is that civil discourse has broken down. It seems to me that we’ve long been in a situation where the craziest voices on both ends of the political spectrum have been amplifying one another and threatening to produce something truly dangerous. And now I think they have. The amount of misinformation in the air—the degree to which even serious people seem to be ruled by false assumptions and non sequiturs—is just astonishing.

And it’s important to keep in mind that, with the presidential election coming in November, the stakes are really high. As most of you know, I consider four more years of Trump to be an existential threat to our democracy. And I believe that the last two weeks have been very good for him, politically, even when everything else seemed to go very badly for him. I know the polls don’t say this. A large majority of people disapprove of his handling this crisis so far. But I think we all know now to take polls with a grain of salt. There is the very real problem of preference falsification—especially in an environment of intense social pressure. People will often say what they think is socially acceptable, and then think, or say, or do something very different in private—like when they’re alone in a voting booth.

Trump has presided over the complete dismantling of American influence in the world and the destruction of our economy. I know the stock market has looked good, but the stock market has become totally uncoupled from the economy. According to the stock market, the future is just as bright now as it was in January of this year, before most of us had even heard of a novel coronavirus. That doesn’t make a lot of sense. And a lot can happen in the next few months. The last two weeks feel like a decade. And my concern is that if Trump now gets to be the law-and-order President, that may be his path to re-election, if such a path exists. Of course, this crisis has revealed, yet again, how unfit he is to be President. The man couldn’t strike a credible note of reconciliation if the fate of the country depended on it—and the fate of the country has depended on it. I also think it’s possible that these protests wouldn’t be happening, but for the fact that Trump is President. Whether or not the problem of racism has gotten worse in our society, having Trump as President surely makes it seem like it has. It has been such a repudiation of the Obama presidency that, for many people, it has made it seem that white supremacy is now ascendant. So, all the more reason to get rid of Trump in November.

But before this social unrest, our focus was on how incompetent Trump was in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic. And now he has been given a very different battle to fight. A battle against leftwing orthodoxy, which is growing more stifling by the minute, and civil unrest. If our social order frays sufficiently, restoring it will be the only thing that most people care about in November. Just think of what an act of domestic terrorism would do politically now. Things can change very, very quickly. And to all a concern for basic law and order “racist”, isn’t going to wash.

Trust in institutions has totally broken down. We’ve been under a very precarious quarantine for more than 3 months, which almost the entire medical profession has insisted is necessary. Doctors and public health officials have castigated people on the political Right for protesting this lockdown. People have been unable to be with their loved ones in their last hours of life. They’ve been unable to hold funerals for them. But now we have doctors and public officials by the thousands, signing open letters, making public statements, saying it’s fine to stand shoulder to shoulder with others in the largest protests our nation has ever seen. The degree to which this has undermined confidence in public health messaging is hard to exaggerate. Whatever your politics, this has been just a mortifying piece of hypocrisy. Especially so, because the pandemic has been hitting the African American community hardest of all. How many people will die because of these protests? It’s a totally rational question to ask, but the question itself is taboo now.

So, it seems to me that almost everything appears upside down at the moment.

Before I get into details on police violence, first let me try to close the door to a few misunderstandings.

Let’s start with the proximate cause of all this: The killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. I’ll have more to say about this in a minute, but nothing I say should detract from the following observation: That video was absolutely sickening, and it revealed a degree of police negligence and incompetence and callousness that everyone was right to be horrified by. In particular, the actions of Derek Chauvin, the cop who kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for nearly 9 minutes, his actions were so reckless and so likely to cause harm that there’s no question he should be prosecuted. And he is being prosecuted. He’s been indicted for 2nd degree murder and manslaughter, and I suspect he will spend many, many years in prison. And, this is not to say “the system is working.” It certainly seems likely that without the cell phone video, and the public outrage, Chauvin might have gotten away with it—to say nothing of the other cops with him, who are also now being prosecuted. If this is true, we clearly need a better mechanism with which to police the police.

So, as I said, I’ll return to this topic, because I think most people are drawing the wrong conclusions from this video, and from videos like it, but let me just echo everyone’s outrage over what happened. This is precisely the kind of police behavior that everyone should find abhorrent.

On the general topic of racism in America, I want to make a few similarly clear, preemptive statements:

Racism is still a problem in American society. No question. And slavery—which was racism’s most evil expression—was this country’s founding sin. We should also add the near-total eradication of the Native Americans to that ledger of evil. Any morally sane person who learns the details of these historical injustices finds them shocking, whatever their race. And the legacy of these crimes—crimes that were perpetrated for centuries—remains a cause for serious moral concern today. I have no doubt about this. And nothing I’m about to say, should suggest otherwise.

And I don’t think it’s an accident that the two groups I just mentioned, African Americans and Native Americans, suffer the worst from inequality in America today. How could the history of racial discrimination in this country not have had lasting effects, given the nature of that history? And if anything good comes out of the current crisis, it will be that we manage to find a new commitment to reducing inequality in all its dimensions. The real debate to have is about how to do this, economically and politically. But the status quo that many of us take for granted to is a betrayal of our values, whether we realize it or not. If it’s not a betrayal or your values now, it will be a betrayal of your values when you become a better person. And if you don’t manage that, it will be a betrayal of your kid’s values when they’re old enough to understand the world they are living in. The difference between being very lucky in our society, and very unlucky, should not be as enormous as it is.

However, the question that interests me, given what has been true of the past and is now true of the present, is what should we do next? What should we do to build a healthier society?

What should we do next? Tomorrow… next week…. Obviously, I don’t have the answers. But I am very worried that many of the things we’re doing now, and seem poised to do, will only make our problems worse. And I’m especially worried that it has become so difficult to talk about this. I’m just trying to have conversations. I’m just trying to figure these things out in real time, with other people. And there is no question that conversation itself has become dangerous.

Think about the politics of this. Endless imagery of people burning and looting independent businesses that were struggling to survive, and seeing the owners of these businesses beaten by mobs, cannot be good for the cause of social justice. Looting and burning businesses, and assaulting their owners, isn’t social justice, or even social protest. It’s crime. And having imagery of these crimes that highlight black involvement circulate endlessly on Fox News and on social media cannot be good for the black community. But it might yet be good for Trump.

And it could well kick open the door to a level of authoritarianism that many of us who have been very worried about Trump barely considered possible. It’s always seemed somewhat paranoid to me to wonder whether we’re living in Weimar Germany. I’ve had many conversations about this. I had Timothy Snyder on the podcast, who’s been worrying about the prospect of tyranny in the US for several years now. I’ve known, in the abstract, that democracies can destroy themselves. But the idea that it could happen here still seemed totally outlandish to me. It doesn’t anymore.

Of course, what we’ve been seeing in the streets isn’t just one thing. Some people are protesting for reasons that I fully defend. They’re outraged by specific instances of police violence, like the killing of George Floyd, and they’re worried about creeping authoritarianism—which we really should be worried about now. And they’re convinced that our politics is broken, because it is broken, and they are deeply concerned that our response to the pandemic and the implosion of our economy will do nothing to address the widening inequality in our society. And they recognize that we have a President who is an incompetent, divisive, conman and a crackpot at a time when we actually need wise leadership.

All of that is hard to put on a sign, but it’s all worth protesting.

However, it seems to me that most protesters are seeing this moment exclusively through the lens of identity politics—and racial politics in particular. And some of them are even celebrating the breakdown of law and order, or at least remaining nonjudgmental about it. And you could see, in the early days of this protest, news anchors take that line, on CNN, for instance. Talking about the history of social protest, “Sometimes it has to be violent, right? What, do you think all of these protests need to be nonviolent?” Those words came out of Chris Cuomo’s mouth, and Don Lemon’s mouth. Many people have been circulating a half quote from Martin Luther King Jr. about riots being “the language of the unheard.” They’re leaving out the part where he made it clear that he believed riots harmed the cause of the black community and helped the cause of racists.

There are now calls to defund and even to abolish the police. This may be psychologically understandable when you’ve spent half your day on Twitter watching videos of cops beating peaceful protesters. Those videos are infuriating. And I’ll have a lot more to say about police violence in a minute. But if you think a society without cops is a society you would want to live in, you have lost your mind. Giving a monopoly on violence to the state is just about the best thing we have ever done as a species. It ranks right up there with keeping our shit out of our food. Having a police force that can deter crime, and solve crimes when they occur, and deliver violent criminals to a functioning justice system, is the necessary precondition for almost anything else of value in society.

We need police reform, of course. There are serious questions to ask about the culture of policing—its hiring practices, training, the militarization of so many police forces, outside oversight, how police departments deal with corruption, the way the police unions keep bad cops on the job, and yes, the problem of racist cops. But the idea that any serious person thinks we can do without the police—or that less trained and less vetted cops will magically be better than more trained and more vetted ones—this just reveals that our conversation on these topics has run completely off the rails. Yes, we should give more resources to community services. We should have psychologists or social workers make first contact with the homeless or the mentally ill. Perhaps we’re giving cops jobs they shouldn’t be doing. All of that makes sense to rethink. But the idea that what we’re witnessing now is a matter of the cops being over-resourced—that we’ve given them too much training, that we’ve made the job too attractive—so that the people we’re recruiting are of too high a quality. That doesn’t make any sense.

What’s been alarming here is that we’re seeing prominent people—in government, in media, in Hollywood, in sports—speak and act as though the breakdown of civil society, and of society itself, is a form of progress and any desire for law enforcement is itself a form of racist oppression. At one point the woman who’s running the City Council in Minneapolis, which just decided to abolish the police force, was asked by a journalist, I believe on CNN, “What do I do if someone’s breaking into my house in the middle of the night? Who do I call?” And her first response to that question was, “You need to recognize what a statement of privilege that question is.” She’s since had to walk that back, because it’s one of the most galling and embarrassing things a public official has ever said, but this is how close the Democratic Party is to sounding completely insane. You cannot say that if someone is breaking into your house, and you’re terrified, and you want a police force that can respond, that fear is a symptom of “white privilege.” This is where Democratic politics goes to die.

Again, what is alarming about this is that this woke analysis of the breakdown of law and order will only encourage an increasingly authoritarian response, as well as the acceptance of that response by many millions of Americans.

If you step back, you will notice that there is a kind of ecstasy of ideological conformity in the air. And it’s destroying institutions. It’s destroying the very institutions we rely on to get our information—universities, the press. The New York Times in recent days, seems to be preparing for a self-immolation in recent days. No one wants to say or even think anything that makes anyone uncomfortable—certainly not anyone who has more wokeness points than they do. It’s just become too dangerous. There are people being fired for tweeting “All Lives Matter.” #AllLivesMatter, in the current environment, is being read as a naked declaration of white supremacy. That is how weird this moment is. A soccer player on the LA Galaxy was fired for something his wife tweeted…

Of course, there are real problems of inequality and despair at the bottom of these protests. People who have never found a secure or satisfying place in the world—or young people who fear they never will—people who have seen their economic prospects simply vanish, and people who have had painful encounters with racism and racist cops—people by the millions are now surrendering themselves to a kind of religious awakening. But like most religious awakenings, this movement is not showing itself eager to make honest contact with reality.

On top of that, we find extraordinarily privileged people, whatever the color of their skin—people who have been living wonderful lives in their gated communities or 5th avenue apartments—and who feel damn guilty about it—they are supporting this movement uncritically, for many reasons. Of course, they care about other people—I’m sure most of them have the same concerns about inequality that I do—but they are also supporting this movement because it promises a perfect expiation of their sins. If you have millions of dollars, and shoot botox into your face, and vacation on St. Bart’s, and you’re liberal—the easiest way to sleep at night is to be as woke as AOC and like every one of her tweets.

The problem isn’t just with the looting, and the arson, and the violence. There are problems with these peaceful protests themselves.

Of course, I’m not questioning anyone’s right to protest. Even our deranged president can pay lip service to that right—which he did as the DC police were violently dispersing a peaceful protest so that he could get his picture taken in front of that church, awkwardly holding a bible, as though he had never held a book in life.

The problem with the protests is that they are animated, to a remarkable degree, by confusion and misinformation. And I’ll explain why I think that’s the case. And, of course, this will be controversial. Needless to say, many people will consider the color of my skin to be disqualifying here. I could have invited any number of great, black intellectuals onto the podcast to make these points for me. But that struck me as a form of cowardice. Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, these guys might not agree with everything I’m about to say, but any one of them could walk the tightrope I’m now stepping out on far more credibly than I can.

But, you see, that’s part of the problem. The perception that the color of a person’s skin, or even his life experience, matters for this discussion is a pernicious illusion. For the discussion we really need to have, the color of a person’s skin, and even his life experience, simply does not matter. It cannot matter. We have to break this spell that the politics of identity has cast over everything.

Ok…

As I’ve already acknowledged, there is a legacy of racism in the United States that we’re still struggling to outgrow. That is obvious. There are real racists out there. And there are ways in which racism became institutionalized long ago. Many of you will remember that during the crack epidemic the penalties for crack and powder cocaine were quite different. And this led black drug offenders to be locked up for much longer than white ones. Now, whether the motivation for that policy was consciously racist or not, I don’t know, but it was effectively racist. Nothing I’m about to say entails a denial of these sorts of facts. There just seems to be no question that boys who grow up with their fathers in prison start life with a significant strike against them. So criminal justice reform is absolutely essential.

And I’m not denying that many black people, perhaps most, have interactions with cops, and others in positions of power, or even random strangers, that seem unambiguously racist. Sometimes this is because they are actually in the presence of racism, and perhaps sometimes it only seems that way. I’ve had unpleasant encounters with cops, and customs officers, and TSA screeners, and bureaucrats of every kind, and even with people working in stores or restaurants. People aren’t always nice or ethical. But being white, and living in a majority white society, I’ve never had to worry about whether any of these collisions were the result of racism. And I can well imagine that in some of these situations, had I been black, I would have come away feeling that I had encountered yet another racist in the wild. So I consider myself very lucky to have gone through life not having to think about any of that. Surely that’s one form of white privilege.

So, nothing I’m going to say denies that we should condemn racism—whether interpersonal or institutional—and we should condemn it wherever we find it. But as a society, we simply can’t afford to find and condemn racism where it doesn’t exist. And we should be increasingly aware of the costs of doing that. The more progress we make on issues of race, the less racism there will be to find, and the more likely we’ll find ourselves chasing after its ghost.

The truth is, we have made considerable progress on the problem of racism in America. This isn’t 1920, and it isn’t 1960. We had a two-term black president. We have black congressmen and women. We have black mayors and black chiefs of police. There are major cities, like Detroit and Atlanta, going on their fifth or sixth consecutive black mayor. Having more and more black people in positions of real power, in what is still a majority white society, is progress on the problem of racism. And the truth is, it might not even solve the problem we’re talking about. When Freddy Gray was killed in Baltimore, virtually everyone who could have been held accountable for his death was black. The problem of police misconduct and reform is complicated, as we’re about to see. But obviously, there is more work to do on the problem of racism. And, more important, there is much more work to do to remedy the inequalities in our society that are so correlated with race, and will still be correlated with race, even after the last racist has been driven from our shores.

The question of how much of today’s inequality is due to existing racism—whether racist people or racist policies—is a genuinely difficult question to answer. And to answer it, we need to distinguish the past from the present.

Take wealth inequality, for example: The median white family has a net worth of around $170,000—these data are a couple of years old, but they’re probably pretty close to what’s true now. The median black family has a net worth of around $17,000. So we have a tenfold difference in median wealth. (That’s the median, not the mean: Half of white families are below 170,000 and half above; half of black families are below 17,000 and half above. And we’re talking about wealth here, not income.)

This disparity in wealth persists even for people whose incomes are in the top 10 percent of the income distribution. For whites in the top 10 percent for income, the median net worth is $1.8 million; for blacks it’s around $350,000. There are probably many things that account for this disparity in wealth. It seems that black families that make it to the top of the income distribution fall out of it more easily than white families do. But it’s also undeniable that black families have less intergenerational wealth accumulated through inheritance.

How much of this is inequality due to the legacy of slavery? And how much of it is due to an ensuing century of racist policies? I’m prepared to believe quite a lot. And it strikes me as totally legitimate to think about paying reparations as a possible remedy here. Of course, one will then need to talk about reparations for the Native Americans. And then one wonders where this all ends. And what about blacks who aren’t descended from slaves, but who still suffered the consequences of racism in the US? In listening to people like John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes discuss this topic, I’m inclined to think that reparations is probably unworkable as a policy. But the truth is that I’m genuinely unsure about this.

Whatever we decide about the specific burdens of the past, we have to ask, how much of current wealth inequality is due to existing racism and to existing policies that make it harder for black families to build wealth? And the only way to get answers to those questions is to have a dispassionate discussion about facts.

The problem with the social activism we are now seeing—what John McWhorter has called “the new religion of anti-Racism”—is that it finds racism nearly everywhere, even where it manifestly does not exist. And this is incredibly damaging to the cause of achieving real equality in our society. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the evil and injustice of slavery and its aftermath. But it is possible to exaggerate how much racism currently exists at an Ivy League university, or in Silicon Valley, or at the Oscars. And those exaggerations are toxic—and, perversely, they may produce more real racism. It seems to me that false claims of victimhood can diminish the social stature of any group, even a group that has a long history of real victimization.

The imprecision here—the bad-faith arguments, the double standards, the goal-post shifting, the idiotic opinion pieces in the New York Times, the defenestrations on social media, the general hysteria that the cult of wokeness has produced—I think this is all extremely harmful to civil society, and to effective liberal politics, and to the welfare of African Americans.

So, with that as preamble, let’s return to the tragic death of George Floyd.

As I said, I believe that any sane person who watches that video will feel that they have witnessed a totally unjustified killing. So, people of any race, are right to be horrified by what happened there. But now I want to ask a few questions, and I want us to try to consider them dispassionately. And I really want you to watch your mind while you do this. There are very likely to be few tripwires installed there, and I’m about to hit them. So just do your best to remain calm.

Does the killing of George Floyd prove that we have a problem of racism in the United States?

Does it even suggest that we have a problem of racism in the United States?

In other words, do we have reason to believe that, had Floyd been white, he wouldn’t have died in a similar way?

Do the dozen or so other videos that have emerged in recent years, of black men being killed by cops, do they prove, or even suggest, that there is an epidemic of lethal police violence directed especially at black men and that this violence is motivated by racism?

Most people seem to think that the answers to these questions are so obvious that to even pose them as I just did is obscene. The answer is YES, and it’s a yes that now needs to be shouted in the streets.

The problem, however, is that if you take even 5 minutes to look at the data on crime and police violence, the answer appears to be “no,” in every case, albeit with one important caveat. I’m not talking about how the police behaved in 1970 or even 1990. But in the last 25 years, violent crime has come down significantly in the US, and so has the police use of deadly force. And as you’re about to see, the police used more deadly force against white people—both in absolute numbers, and in terms of their contribution to crime and violence in our society. But the public perception is, of course, completely different.

In a city like Los Angeles, 2019 was a 30-year low for police shootings. Think about that…. Do the people who were protesting in Los Angeles, peacefully and violently, do the people who were ransacking and burning businesses by the hundreds—in many cases, businesses that will not return to their neighborhoods—do the people who caused so much damage to the city, that certain neighborhoods, ironically the neighborhoods that are disproportionately black, will take years, probably decades to recover, do the celebrities who supported them, and even bailed them out of jail—do any of these people know that 2019 was the 30-year low for police shootings in Los Angeles?

Before I step out further over the abyss here, let me reiterate: Many of you are going to feel a visceral negative reaction to what I’m about to say. You’re not going to like the way it sounds. You’re especially not going to like the way it sounds coming from a white guy. This feeling of not liking, this feeling of outrage, this feeling of disgust—this feeling of “Sam, what the fuck is wrong with you, why are you even touching this topic?”—this feeling isn’t an argument. It isn’t, or shouldn’t be, the basis for your believing anything to be true or false about the world.

Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that I or anyone else needs to respect. Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that you should respect. In fact, it is something that you should be on your guard for. Perhaps more than any other property of your mind, this feeling can mislead you.

If you care about justice—and you absolutely should—you should care about facts and the ability to discuss them openly. Justice requires contact with reality. It simply isn’t the case—it cannot be the case—that the most pressing claims on our sense of justice need come from those who claim to be the most offended by conversation itself.

So, I’m going to speak the language of facts right now, in so far as we know them, all the while knowing that these facts run very much counter to most people’s assumptions. Many of the things you think you know about crime and violence in our society are almost certainly wrong. And that should matter to you.

So just take a moment and think this through with me.

How many people are killed each year in America by cops? If you don’t know, guess. See if you have any intuitions for these numbers. Because your intuitions are determining how you interpret horrific videos of the sort we saw coming out of Minneapolis.

The answer for many years running is about 1000. One thousand people are killed by cops in America each year. There are about 50 to 60 million encounters between civilians and cops each year, and about 10 million arrests. That’s down from a high of over 14 million arrests annually throughout the 1990’s. So, of the 10 million occasions where a person attracts the attention of the police, and the police decide to make an arrest, about 1000 of those people die as a result. (I’m sure a few people get killed even when no arrest was attempted, but that has to be a truly tiny number.) So, without knowing anything else about the situation, if the cops decide to arrest you, it would be reasonable to think that your chance of dying is around 1/10,000. Of course, in the United States, it’s higher than it is in other countries. So I’m not saying that this number is acceptable. But it is what it is for a reason, as we’re about to see.

Now, there are a few generic things I’d like to point here before we get further into the data. They should be uncontroversial.

First, it’s almost certainly the case that of these 1000 officer-caused deaths each year, some are entirely justified—it may even be true that most are entirely justified—and some are entirely unjustified, and some are much harder to judge. And that will be true next year. And the year after that.

Of the unjustified killings, there are vast differences between them. Many have nothing in common but for the fact that a cop killed someone unnecessarily. It might have been a terrible misunderstanding, or incompetence, or just bad luck, and in certain cases it could be a cop who decides to murder someone because he’s become enraged, or he’s just a psychopath. And it is certainly possible that racial bias accounts for some number of these unjustified killings.

Another point that should be uncontroversial—but may sound a little tone-deaf in the current environment, where we’ve inundated with videos of police violence in response to these protests. But this has to be acknowledged whenever we’re discussing this topic: Cops have a very hard job. In fact, in the current environment, they have an almost impossible job.

If you’re making 10 million arrests every year, some number of people will decide not to cooperate. There can be many reasons for this. A person could be mentally ill, or drunk, or on drugs. Of course, rather often the person is an actual criminal who doesn’t want to be arrested.

Among innocent people, and perhaps this getting more common these days, a person might feel that resisting arrest is the right thing to do, ethically or politically or as a matter of affirming his identity. After all, put yourself in his shoes, he did nothing wrong. Why are the cops arresting him? I don’t know if we have data on the numbers of people who resist arrest by race. But I can well imagine that if it’s common for African Americans to believe that the only reason they have been singled out for arrest is due to racism on the part of the police, that could lead to greater levels of non-compliance. Which seems very likely to lead to more unnecessary injury and death. This is certainly one reason why it is wise to have the racial composition of a police force mirror that of the community it’s policing. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that this will reduce lethal violence from the side of the police. In fact, the evidence we have suggests that black and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. But it would surely change the perception of the community that racism is a likely explanation for police behavior, which itself might reduce conflict.

When a cop goes hands on a person in an attempt to control his movements or make an arrest, that person’s resistance poses a problem that most people don’t understand. If you haven’t studied this topic. If you don’t know what it physically takes to restrain and immobilize a non-compliant person who may be bigger and stronger than you are, and if you haven’t thought through the implications of having a gun on your belt while attempting to do that—a gun that can be grabbed and used against you, or against a member of the public—then your intuitions about what makes sense here, tactically and ethically, are very likely to be bad.

If you haven’t trained with firearms under stress. If you don’t know how suddenly situations can change. If you haven’t experienced how quickly another person can close the distance on you, and how little time you have to decide to draw your weapon. If you don’t know how hard it is to shoot a moving target, or even a stationary one, when your heart is beating out of your chest. You very likely have totally unreasonable ideas about what we can expect from cops in situations like these. [VIDEO, VIDEO, VIDEO]

And there is another fact that looms over all this like the angel of Death, literally: Most cops do not get the training they need. They don’t get the hand-to-hand training they need—they don’t have good skills to subdue people without harming them. All you need to do is watch YouTube videos of botched arrests to see this. The martial arts community stands in perpetual astonishment at the kinds of things cops do and fail to do once they start fighting with suspects. Cops also don’t get the firearms training they need. Of course, there are elite units in many police departments, but most cops do not have the training they need to do the job they’re being asked to do.

It is also true, no doubt, that some cops are racist bullies. And there are corrupt police departments that cover for these guys, and cover up police misconduct generally, whether it was borne of racism or not.

But the truth is that even if we got rid of all bad cops, which we absolutely should do, and there were only good people left, and we got all these good people the best possible training, and we gave them the best culture in which to think about their role in society, and we gave them the best methods for de-escalating potentially violent situations—which we absolutely must do—and we scrubbed all the dumb laws from our books, so that when cops were required to enforce the law, they were only risking their lives and the lives of civilians for reasons that we deem necessary and just—so the war on drugs is obviously over—even under these conditions of perfect progress, we are still guaranteed to have some number of cases each year where a cop kills a civilian in a way that is totally unjustified, and therefore tragic. Every year, there will be some number of families who will be able to say that the cops killed their son or daughter, or father or mother, or brother or sister. And videos of these killings will occasionally surface, and they will be horrific. This seems guaranteed to happen.

So, while we need to make all these improvements, we still need to understand that there are very likely always to going to be videos of cops doing something inexplicable, or inexplicably stupid, that results in an innocent person’s death, or a not-so-innocent person’s death. And sometimes the cop will be white and the victim will be black. We have 10 million arrests each year. And we now live in a panopticon where practically everything is videotaped.

I’m about to get further into the details of what we know about police violence, but I want to just put it to you now: If we’re going to let the health of race relations in this country, or the relationship between the community and the police, depend on whether we ever see a terrible video of police misconduct again, the project of healing these wounds in our society is doomed.

About a week into these protests I heard Van Jones on CNN say, “If we see one more video of a cop brutalizing a black man, this country could go over the edge.” He said this, not as indication of how dangerously inflamed people have become. He seemed to be saying it as an ultimatum to the police. With 10 million arrests a year, arrests that have to take place in the most highly armed society in the developed world, I hope you understand how unreasonable that ultimatum is.

We have to put these videos into context. And we have to acknowledge how different they are from one another. Some of them are easy to interpret. But some are quite obviously being interpreted incorrectly by most people—especially by activists. And there are a range of cases—some have video associated with them and some don’t—that are now part of a litany of anti-racist outrage, and the names of the dead are intoned as though they were all evidence of the same injustice. And yet, they are not.

Walter Scott was stopped for a broken taillight and got out of his car and tried to flee. There might have been a brief struggle over the officer’s taser, that part of the video isn’t clear. But what is clear is that he was shot in the back multiple times as he was running away. That was insane. There was zero reason for the officer to feel that his life was under threat at the point he opened fire. And for that unjustified shooting, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. I’m not sure that’s long enough. That seemed like straight-up murder.

The George Floyd video, while even more disturbing to watch, is harder to interpret. I don’t know anything about Derek Chauvin, the cop who knelt on his neck. It’s quite possible that he’s a terrible person who should have never been a cop. He seems to have a significant number of complaints against him—though, as far as I know, the details of those complaints haven’t been released. And he might be a racist on top of being a bad cop. Or he might be a guy who was totally in over his head and thought you could restrain someone indefinitely by keeping a knee on their neck indefinitely. I don’t know. I’m sure more facts will come out. But whoever he is, I find it very unlikely that he was intending to kill George Floyd. Think about it. He was surrounded by irate witnesses and being filmed. Unless he was aspiring to become the most notorious murderer in human history, it seems very unlikely that he was intending to commit murder in that moment. It’s possible, of course. But it doesn’t seem the likeliest explanation for his behavior.

What I believe we saw on that video was the result of a tragic level of negligence and poor training on the part of those cops. Or terrible recruitment—it’s possible that none of these guys should have ever been cops. I think for one of them, it was only his fourth day on the job. Just imagine that. Just imagine all things you don’t know as a new cop. It could also be a function of bad luck in terms of Floyd’s underlying health. It’s been reported that he was complaining of being unable to breath before Chauvin pinned him with his knee. The knee on his neck might not have been the only thing that caused his death. It could have also been the weight of the other officer pinning him down.

This is almost certainly what happened in the cast of Eric Garner. Half the people on earth believe they witnessed a cop choke Eric Garner to death in that video. That does not appear to be what happened. When Eric Garner is saying “I can’t breathe” he’s not being choked. He’s being held down on the pavement by several officers. Being forced down on your stomach under the weight of several people can kill a person, especially someone with lung or heart disease. In the case of Eric Garner, it is absolutely clear that the cop who briefly attempted to choke him was no longer choking him. If you doubt that, watch the video again.

And if you are recoiling now from my interpretation of these videos, you really should watch the killing of Tony Timpa. It’s also terribly disturbing, but it removes the variable of race and it removes any implication of intent to harm on the part of the cops about as clearly as you could ask. It really is worth watching as a corrective to our natural interpretation of these other videos.

Tony Timpa was a white man in Dallas, who was suffering some mental health emergency and cocaine intoxication. And he actually called 911 himself. What we see is the bodycam footage from the police, which shows that he was already in handcuffs when they arrived—a security guard had cuffed him. And then the cops take over, and they restrain Timpa on the ground, by rolling him onto a stomach and putting their weight on him, very much like in the case of Eric Garner. And they keep their weight on him—one cop has a knee on his upper back, which is definitely much less aggressive than a knee on the neck—but they crush the life out of him all the same, over the course of 13 minutes. He’s not being choked. The cops are not being rough. There’s no animus between them and Timpa. It was not a hostile arrest. They clearly believe that they’re responding to a mental health emergency. But they keep him down on his belly, under their weight, and they’re cracking jokes as he loses consciousness. Now, your knowledge that he’s going to be dead by the end of this video, make their jokes seem pretty callous. But this was about as benign an imposition of force by cops as you’re going to see. The crucial insight you will have watching this video, is that the officers not only had no intent to kill Tony Timpa, they don’t take his pleading seriously because they have no doubt that what they’re doing is perfectly safe—perfectly within protocol. They’ve probably done this hundreds of times before.

If you watch that video—and, again, fair warning, it is disturbing—but imagine how disturbing it would have been to our society if Tony Timpa had been black. If the only thing you changed about the video was the color of Timpa’s skin, then that video would have detonated like a nuclear bomb in our society, exactly as the George Floyd video did. In fact, in one way it is worse, or would have been perceived to be worse. I mean, just imagine white cops telling jokes as they crushed the life out of a black Tony Timpa… Given the nature of our conversation about violence, given the way we perceive videos of this kind, there is no way that people would have seen that as anything other than a lynching. And yet, it would not have been a lynching.

Now, I obviously have no idea what was in the minds of cops in Minneapolis. And perhaps we’ll learn at trial. Perhaps a tape of Chauvin using the N-word in another context will surface, bringing in a credible allegation of racism. It seems to me that Chauvin is going to have a very hard time making sense of his actions. But most people who saw that video believe they have seen, with their own eyes, beyond any possibility of doubt, a racist cop intentionally murder an innocent man. That’s not what the video necessarily shows.

As I said, these videos can be hard to interpret, even while seeming very easy to interpret. And these cases, whether we have associated video or not, are very different. Michael Brown is reported to have punched a cop in the face and attempted to get his gun. As far as I know, there’s no video of that encounter. But, if true, that is an entirely different situation. If you’re attacking a cop, trying to get his gun, that is a life and death struggle that almost by definition for the cop, and it most cases justifies the use of lethal force. And honestly, it seems that no one within a thousand miles of Black Lives Matter is willing to make these distinctions. An attitude of anti-racist moral outrage is not the best lens through which to interpret evidence of police misconduct.

I’ve seen many videos of people getting arrested. And I’ve seen the outraged public reaction to what appears to be inappropriate use of force by the cops. One overwhelming fact that comes through is that people, whatever the color of their skin, don’t understand how to behave around cops so as to keep themselves safe. People have to stop resisting arrest. This may seem obvious, but judging from most of these videos, and from the public reaction to them, this must be a totally arcane piece of information. When a cop wants to take you into custody, you don’t get to decide whether or not you should be arrested. When a cop wants to take you into custody, for whatever reason, it’s not a negotiation. And if you turn it into a wrestling match, you’re very likely to get injured or killed.

This is a point I once belabored in a podcast with Glenn Loury, and it became essentially a public service announcement. And I’ve gone back and listened to those comments, and I want to repeat them here. This is something that everyone really needs to understand. And it’s something that Black Lives Matter should be teaching explicitly: If you put your hands on a cop—if you start wrestling with a cop, or grabbing him because he’s arresting your friend, or pushing him, or striking him, or using your hands in way that can possibly be interpreted as your reaching for a gun—you are likely to get shot in the United States, whatever the color of your skin.

As I said, when you’re with a cop, there is always a gun out in the open. And any physical struggle has to be perceived by him as a fight for the gun. A cop doesn’t know what you’re going to do if you overpower him, so he has to assume the worst. Most cops are not confident in their ability to physically control a person without shooting him—for good reason, because they’re not well trained to do that, and they’re continually confronting people who are bigger, or younger, or more athletic, or more aggressive than they are. Cops are not superheroes. They’re ordinary people with insufficient training, and once things turn physical they cannot afford to give a person who is now assaulting a police officer the benefit of the doubt.

This is something that most people seem totally confused about. If they see a video of somebody trying to punch a cop in the face and the person’s unarmed, many people think the cop should just punch back, and any use of deadly force would be totally disproportionate. But that’s not how violence works. It’s not the cop’s job to be the best bare-knuckled boxer on Earth so he doesn’t have to use his gun. A cop can’t risk getting repeatedly hit in the face and knocked out, because there’s always a gun in play. This is the cop’s perception of the world, and it’s a justifiable one, given the dynamics of human violence.

You might think cops shouldn’t carry guns. Why can’t we just be like England? That’s a point that can be debated. But it requires considerable thought in a country where there are over 300 million guns on the street. The United States is not England.

Again, really focus on what is happening when a cop is attempting to arrest a person. It’s not up to you to decide whether or not you should be arrested. Does it matter that you know you didn’t do anything wrong? No. And how could that fact be effectively communicated in the moment by your not following police commands? I’m going to ask that again: How could the fact that you’re innocent, that you’re not a threat to cop, that you’re not about to suddenly attack him or produce a weapon of your own, how could those things be effectively communicated at the moment he’s attempting to arrest you by your resisting arrest?

Unless you called the cops yourself, you never know what situation you’re in. If I’m walking down the street, I don’t know if the cop who is approaching me didn’t get a call that some guy who looks like Ben Stiller just committed an armed robbery. I know I didn’t do anything, but I don’t know what’s in the cop’s head. The time to find out what’s going on—the time to complain about racist cops, the time to yell at them and tell them they’re all going to get fired for their stupidity and misconduct—is after cooperating, at the police station, in the presence of a lawyer, preferably. But to not comply in the heat of the moment, when a guy with the gun is issuing commands—this raises your risk astronomically, and it’s something that most people, it seems, just do not intuitively understand, even when they’re not in the heat of the moment themselves, but just watching video of other people getting arrested.

Ok. End of public-service announcement.

The main problem with using individual cases, where black men and women have been killed by cops, to conclude that there is an epidemic of racist police violence in our society, is that you can find nearly identical cases of white suspects being killed by cops, and there are actually more of them.

In 2016, John McWhorter wrote a piece in Time Magazine about this.

Here’s a snippet of what he wrote:

“The heart of the indignation over these murders is a conviction that racist bias plays a decisive part in these encounters. That has seemed plausible to me, and I have recently challenged those who disagree to present a list of white people killed within the past few years under circumstances similar to those that so enrage us in cases such as what happened to Tamir Rice, John Crawford, Walter Scott, Sam Debose, and others.”

So, McWhorter issued that challenge, as he said, and he was presented with the cases [VIDEO, VIDEO, VIDEO]. But there’s no song about these people, admonishing us to say their names. And the list of white names is longer, and I don’t know any of them, other than Tony Timpa. I know the black names. In addition to the ones I just read from McWhorter’s article, I know the names of Eric Garner, and Michael Brown, and Alton Sterling, and Philando Castile, and now, of course, I know the name of George Floyd. And I’m aware of many of the details of these cases where black men and women have been killed by cops. I know the name of Breonna Taylor. I can’t name a single white person killed by cops in circumstances like these—other than Timpa—and I just read McWhorter’s article where he lists many of them.

So, this is also a distortion in the media. The media is not showing us videos of white people being killed by cops; activists are not demanding that they do this. I’m sure white supremacists talk about this stuff a lot, who knows? But in terms of the story we’re telling ourselves in the mainstream, we are not actually talking about the data on lethal police violence.

So back to the data: Again, cops kill around 1000 people every year in the United States. About 25 percent are black. About 50 percent are white. The data on police homicide are all over the place. The federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind. But they have been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources, like the Washington Post, for the last 5 years. These ratios appear stable over time. Again, many of these killings are justifiable, we’re talking about career criminals who are often armed and, in many cases, trying to kill the cops. Those aren’t the cases we’re worried about. We’re worried about the unjustifiable homicides.

Now, some people will think that these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice. Afterall, African Americans are only 13 percent of the population. So, at most, they should be 13 percent of the victims of police violence, not 25 percent. Any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism.

Ok. Well, that sounds plausible, but consider a few more facts:

Blacks are 13 percent of the population, but they commit at least 50 percent of the murders and other violent crimes.

If you have 13 percent of the population responsible for 50 percent of the murders—and in some cities committing 2/3rds of all violent crime—what percent of police attention should it attract? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s not just 13 percent. Given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black, I’m pretty sure that most black people wouldn’t set the dial at 13 percent either.

And here we arrive at the core of the problem. The story of crime in America is overwhelmingly the story of black-on-black crime. It is also, in part, a story of black-on-white crime. For more than a generation, crime in America really hasn’t been a story of much white-on-black crime. [Some listeners mistook my meaning here. I’m not denying that most violent crime is intraracial. So, it’s true that most white homicide victims are killed by white offenders. Per capita, however, the white crime rate is much lower than the black crime rate. And there is more black-on-white crime than white-on-black crime.—SH]

The murder rate has come down steadily since the early 1990’s, with only minor upticks. But, nationwide, blacks are still 6 times more likely to get murdered than whites, and in some cities their risk is double that. And around 95 percent of the murders are committed by members of the African American community. [While reported in 2015, these data were more than a decade old. Looking at more recent data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the number appears to be closer to 90 percent.—SH]

The weekend these protests and riots were kicking off nationwide—when our entire country seemed to be tearing itself apart over a perceived epidemic of racist police violence against the black community, 92 people were shot, and 27 killed, in Chicago alone—one city. This is almost entirely a story of black men killing members of their own community. And this is far more representative of the kind of violence that the black community needs to worry about. And, ironically, it’s clear that one remedy for this violence is, or would be, effective policing.

These are simply the facts of crime in our society as we best understand them. And the police have to figure out how to respond to these facts, professionally and ethically. The question is, are they doing that? And, obviously, there’s considerable doubt that they’re doing that, professionally and ethically.

Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist who’s work I discussed on the podcast with Glenn Loury, studied police encounters involving black and white suspects and the use of force.

His paper is titled, this from 2016, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.”

Fryer is black, and he went into this research with the expectation that the data would confirm that there’s an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at black men. But he didn’t find that. However, he did find support for the suspicion that black people suffer more nonlethal violence at the hands of cops than whites do.

So let’s look at this.

The study examined data from 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California. Generally, Fryer found that there is 25 percent greater likelihood that the police would go hands on black suspects than white ones—cuffing them, or forcing them to ground, or using other non-lethal force.

Specifically, in New York City, in encounters where white and black citizens were matched for other characteristics, they found that:

Cops were…

17 percent more likely to go hands on black suspects

18 percent more likely to push them into a wall

16 percent more likely to put them in handcuffs (in a situation in which they aren’t arrested)

18 percent more likely to push them to the ground

25 percent more likely to use pepper spray or a baton

19 percent more likely to draw their guns

24 percent more likely to point a gun at them.

This is more or less the full continuum of violence short of using lethal force. And it seems, from the data we have, that blacks receive more of it than whites. What accounts for this disparity? Racism? Maybe. However, as I said, it’s inconvenient to note that other data suggest that black cops and Hispanic cops are more likely to shoot black and Hispanic suspects than white cops are. I’m not sure how an ambient level of racism explains that.

Are there other explanations? Well, again, could it be that blacks are less cooperative with the police. If so, that’s worth understanding. A culture of resisting arrest would be a very bad thing to cultivate, given that the only response to such resistance is for the police to increase their use of force.

Whatever is true here is something we should want to understand. And it’s all too easy to see how an increased number of encounters with cops, due to their policing in the highest crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black, and an increased number of traffic stops in those neighborhoods, and an increased propensity for cops to go hands-on these suspects, with or without an arrest, for whatever reason—it’s easy to see how all of this could be the basis for a perception of racism, whether or not racism is the underlying motivation.

It is totally humiliating to be arrested or manhandled by a cop. And, given the level of crime in the black community, a disproportionate number of innocent black men seem guaranteed to have this experience. It’s totally understandable that this would make them bitter and mistrustful of the police. This is another vicious circle that we must find some way to interrupt.

But Fryer also found that black suspects are around 25 percent less likely to be shot than white suspects are. And in the most egregious situations, where officers were not first attacked, but nevertheless fired their weapons at a suspect, they were more likely to do this when the suspect was white.

Again, the data are incomplete. This doesn’t not cover every city in the country. And a larger study tomorrow might paint a different picture. But, as far as I know, the best data we have suggest that for, whatever reason, whites are more likely to be killed by cops once an arrest is attempted. And a more recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by David Johnson and colleagues found similar results. And it is simply undeniable that more whites are killed by cops each year, both in absolute numbers and in proportion to their contributions to crime and violence in our society.

Can you hear how these facts should be grinding in that well-oiled machine of woke outrage? Our society is in serious trouble now. We are being crushed under the weight of a global pandemic and our response to it has been totally inept. On top of that, we’re being squeezed by the growing pressure of what might become a full-on economic depression. And the streets are now filled with people who imagine, on the basis of seeing some horrific videos, that there is an epidemic of racist cops murdering African Americans. Look at what this belief is doing to our politics. And these videos will keep coming. And the truth is they could probably be matched 2 for 1 with videos of white people being killed by cops. What percentage of people protesting understand that the disparity runs this way? In light of the belief that the disparity must run the other way, people are now quite happy to risk getting beaten and arrested by cops themselves, and to even loot and burn businesses. And most people and institutions are supporting this civil unrest from the sidelines, because they too imagine that cops are killing black people in extraordinary numbers. And all of this is calling forth an authoritarian response from Trump—and leading to more examples of police violence caught on video.

As I hope I’ve made clear, we need police reform—there’s no question about this. And some of the recent footage of the police attacking peaceful protests is outrageous. Nothing I just said should signify that I’m unaware of that. From what I’ve seen—and by the time I release this podcast, the character of all this might have changed—but, from what I’ve seen, the police were dangerously passive in the face of looting and real crime, at least in the beginning. In many cities, they just stood and watched society unravel. And then they were far too aggressive in the face of genuinely peaceful protests. This is a terrible combination. It is the worst combination. There’s no better way to increase cynicism and anger and fear, on all sides.

But racializing how we speak about the problem of police violence, where race isn’t actually the relevant variable—again, think of Tony Timpa— this has highly negative effects. First, it keeps us from talking about the real problems with police tactics. For instance, we had the recent case of Breonna Taylor who was killed in a so-called “no knock” raid of her home. As occasionally happens, in this carnival of moral error we call “the war on drugs,” the police had the wrong address, and they kicked in the wrong door. And they wound up killing a totally innocent woman. But this had nothing to do with race. The problem is not, as some commentators have alleged, that it’s not safe to be “sleeping while black.” The problem is that these no-knock raids are an obscenely dangerous way of enforcing despicably stupid laws. White people die under precisely these same circumstances, and very likely in greater numbers (I don’t have data specifically on no-knock raids, but we can assume that the ratio is probably conserved here).

Think about how crazy this policy is in a nation where gun ownership is so widespread. If someone kicks in your door in the middle of the night, and you’re a gun owner, of course you’re going to reach for your gun. That’s why you have a gun in the first place. The fact that people bearing down on you and your family out of the darkness might have yelled “police” (or might have not yelled “police”; it’s alleged in some of these cases that they don’t yell anything)—the fact that someone yells “police” isn’t necessarily convincing. Anyone can yell “police.” And, again, think of the psychology of this: If the police have the wrong house, and you know there is no reason on earth that real cops would take an interest in you, especially in the middle of the night, because you haven’t done anything (you’re not the guy running a meth lab)—and now you’re reaching for your gun in the dark—of course, someone is likely to get killed. This is not a racial issue. It’s a terrible policy.

Unfortunately, the process of police reform isn’t straightforward—and it is made massively more complicated by what’s happening now. Yes, we will be urging police reform in a very big way now, that much seems clear. But Roland Fryer has also shown that investigations of the cops, in a climate where viral videos and racial politics are operating, have dramatic effects, many of which are negative.

He studied the aftermath of the investigations into police misconduct that followed the killings Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, and Lequan McDonald, and found that, for reasons that seem pretty easy to intuit, proactive police contact with civilians decreases drastically, sometimes by as much 100 percent, once these investigations get started. This is now called “The Ferguson Effect.” The police still answer 911 calls, but they don’t investigate suspicious activity in the same way. They don’t want to wind up on YouTube. And when they alter their behavior like this, homicides go up. Fryer estimates that the effects of these few investigations translated into 1000 extra homicides, and almost 40,000 more felonies, over the next 24 months in the US. And, of course, most of the victims of those crimes were black. One shudders to imagine the size of the Ferguson effect we’re about to see nationwide… I’m sure the morale among cops has never been lower. I think it’s almost guaranteed that cops by the thousands will be leaving the force. And it will be much more difficult to recruit good people.

Who is going to want to be a cop now? Who could be idealist about occupying that role in society? It seems to me that the population of people who will become cops now will be more or less indistinguishable from the population of people who become prison guards. I’m pretty sure there’s a difference there, and I think we’re likely to see that difference expressed in the future. It’s a grim picture, unless we do something very creative here.

So there’s a real question about how we can reform police departments, and get rid of bad cops, without negatively impacting the performance of good cops? That’s a riddle we have to solve—or at least we have to understand what the trade-offs are here.

Why is all of this happening now? Police killings of civilians have gone way down. And they are rare events. They are 1/10,000 level events, if measured by arrests. 1/50-60,000 level events if measured by police encounters. And the number of unarmed people who are killed is smaller still. Around 50 last year, again, more were white than black. And not all unarmed victims are innocent. Some get killed in the act of attacking the cops. [EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE, EXAMPLE]

Again, the data don’t tell a clean story, or the whole story. I see no reason to doubt that blacks get more attention from the cops—though, honestly, given the distribution of crime in our society, I don’t know what the alternative to that would be. And once the cops get involved, blacks are more likely to get roughed up, which is bad. But, again, it simply isn’t clear that racism is the cause. And contrary to everyone’s expectations, whites seem more likely to get killed by cops. Actually, one factor seems to be that whites are 7 times more likely to commit “suicide by cop” (and 3 times more likely to commit suicide generally). What’s going on there? Who knows?

There’s a lot we don’t understand about these data. But ask yourself, would our society seem less racist if the disparity ran the other way? Is less physical contact, but a greater likelihood of getting shot and killed a form of white privilege? Is a higher level of suicide by cop, and suicide generally, a form of white privilege? We have a problem here that, read either way, you can tell a starkly racist narrative.

We need ethical, professional policing, of course. But the places with the highest crime in our society need the most of it. Is there any doubt about that? In a city like Milwaukee, blacks are 12 times more likely to get murdered than whites [Not sure where I came by this number, probably a lecture or podcast. It appears the rate is closer to 20 times more likely and 22 times more likely in Wisconsin as a whole—SH], again, they are being killed by other African Americans, nearly 100 percent of the time. I think the lowest figure I’ve seen is 93 percent of the time. [As noted above, more recent data suggest that it’s closer to 90 percent]. What should the police do about this? And what are they likely to do now that our entire country has been convulsed over one horrific case of police misconduct?

We need to lower the temperature on this conversation, and many other conversations, and understand what is actually happening in our society.

But instead of doing this, we now have a whole generation of social activists who seem eager to play a game of chicken with the forces of chaos. Everything I said about the problem of inequality and the need for reform stands. But I think that what we are witnessing in our streets, and on social media, and even in the mainstream press, is a version of mass hysteria. And the next horrific video of a black person being killed by cops won’t be evidence to the contrary. And there will be another video. There are 10 million arrests every year. There will always be another video.

And the media has turned these videos into a form of political pornography. And this has deranged us. We’re now unable to speak or even think about facts. The media has been poisoned by bad incentives, in this regard, and social media doubly so.

In the mainstream of this protest movement, it’s very common to hear that the only problem with what is happening in our streets, apart from what the cops are doing, is that some criminal behavior at the margins—a little bit of looting, a little bit of violence—has distracted us from an otherwise necessary and inspiring response to an epidemic of racism. Most people in the media have taken exactly this line. People like Anderson Cooper on CNN or the editorial page of the New York Times or public figures like President Obama or Vice President Biden. The most prominent liberal voices believe that the protests themselves make perfect moral and political sense, and that movements like Black Lives Matter are guaranteed to be on the right side of history. How could anyone who is concerned about inequality and injustice in our society see things any other way? How could anyone who isn’t himself racist not support Black Lives Matter?

But, of course, there’s a difference between slogans and reality. There’s a difference between the branding of a movement and its actual aims. And this can be genuinely confusing. That’s why propaganda works. For instance, many people assume there’s nothing wrong with ANTIFA, because this group of total maniacs has branded itself as “anti-fascist.” What could be wrong with being anti-fascist? Are you pro fascism?

There’s a similar problem with Black Lives Matter—though, happily, unlike ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter actually seems committed to peaceful protest, which is hugely important. So the problem I’m discussing is more ideological, and it’s much bigger than Black Lives Matter—though BLM is its most visible symbol of this movement. The wider issue is that we are in the midst of a public hysteria and moral panic. And it has been made possible by a near total unwillingness, particularly on the Left, among people who value their careers and their livelihoods and their reputations, and fear being hounded into oblivion online—this is nearly everyone left-of-center politically. People are simply refusing to speak honestly about the problem of race and racism in America.

We are making ourselves sick. We are damaging our society. And by protesting the wrong thing, even the slightly wrong thing, and unleashing an explosion of cynical criminality in the process—looting that doesn’t even have the pretense of protest—the Left is empowering Trump, whatever the polls currently show. And if we are worried about Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, as I think we really should be, this is important to understand. He recently had what looked like paramilitary troops guarding the White House. I don’t know if we found out who those guys actually were, but that was genuinely alarming. But how are Democrats calls to “abolish the police” going to play to half the country that just watched so many cities get looted? We have to vote Trump out of office and restore the integrity of our institutions. And we have to make the political case for major reforms to deal with the problem of inequality—a problem which affects the black community most of all.

We need police reform; we need criminal justice reform; we need tax reform; we need health care reform; we need environmental reform—we need all of these things and more. And to be just, these policies will need to reduce the inequality in our society. If we did this, African Americans would benefit, perhaps more than any other group. But it’s not at all clear that progress along these dimensions primarily entails us finding and eradicating more racism in our society.

Just ask yourself, what would real progress on the problem of racism look like? What would utter progress look like?

Here’s what I think it would look like: More and more people (and ultimately all people) would care less and less (and ultimately not at all) about race. As I’ve said before in various places, skin color would become like hair color in its political and moral significance—which is to say that it would have none.

Now, maybe you don’t agree with that aspiration. Maybe you think that tribalism based on skin color can’t be outgrown or shouldn’t be outgrown. Well, if you think that, I’m afraid I don’t know what to say to you. It’s not that there’s nothing to say, it’s just there is so much we disagree about, morally and politically, that I don’t know where to begin. So that debate, if it can even be had, will have to be left for another time.

For the purposes of this conversation, I have to assume that you agree with me about the goal here, which is to say that you share the hope that there will come a time where the color of a person’s skin really doesn’t matter. What would that be like?

Well, how many blondes got into Harvard this year? Does anyone know? What percentage of the police in San Diego are brunette? Do we have enough red heads in senior management in our Fortune 500 companies? No one is asking these questions, and there is a reason for that. No one cares. And we are right not to care.

Imagine a world in which people cared about hair color to the degree that we currently care—or seem to care, or imagine that others care, or allege that they secretly care—about skin color. Imagine a world in which discrimination by hair color was a thing, and it took centuries to overcome, and it remains a persistent source of private pain and public grievance throughout society, even where it no longer exists. What an insane misuse of human energy that would be. What an absolute catastrophe.

The analogy isn’t perfect, for a variety of reasons, but it’s good enough for us to understand what life would be like if the spell of racism and anti-racism were truly broken. The future we want is not one in which we have all become passionate anti-racists. It’s not a future in which we are forever on our guard against the slightest insult—the bad joke, the awkward compliment, the tweet that didn’t age well. We want to get to a world in which skin color and other superficial characteristics of a person become morally and politically irrelevant. And if you don’t agree with that, what did you think Martin Luther King Jr was talking about?

And, finally, if you’re on the Left and don’t agree with this vision of a post-racial future, please observe that the people who agree with you, the people who believe that there is no overcoming race, and that racial identity is indissoluble, and that skin color really matters and will always matter—these people are white supremacists and neo-Nazis and other total assholes. And these are also people I can’t figure out how to talk to, much less persuade.

So the question for the rest of us—those of us who want to build a world populated by human beings, merely—the question is, how do we get there? How does racial difference become uninteresting? Can it become uninteresting by more and more people taking a greater interest in it? Can it become uninteresting by becoming a permanent political identity? Can it become uninteresting by our having thousands of institutions whose funding (and, therefore, very survival) depends on it remaining interesting until the end of the world?

Can it become less significant by being granted more and more significance? By becoming a fetish, a sacred object, ringed on all sides by taboos? Can race become less significant if you can lose your reputation and even your livelihood, at any moment, by saying one wrong word about it?

I think these questions answer themselves. To outgrow our obsession with racial difference, we have outgrow our obsession with race. And you don’t do that by maintaining your obsession with it.

Now, you might agree with me about the goal and about how a post-racial society would seem, but you might disagree about the path to get there—the question of what to do next. In fact, one podcast listener wrote to me recently to say that while he accepted my notion of a post-racial future, he thinks it’s just far too soon to talk about putting racial politics behind us. He asked me to imagine just how absurd it would have been to tell Martin Luther King Jr, at the dawn of the civil rights movement, that the path beyond racism requires that he become less and less obsessed with race.

That seems like a fair point, but Coleman Hughes has drawn my attention to a string of MLK quotes that seem to be just as transcendent of racial identity politics as I’m hoping to be here. You can see these quotations on his Twitter feed. None of those statements by King would make sense coming out of Black Lives Matter at the moment.

In any case, as I said, I think we are living in a very different time than Martin Luther King was. And what I see all around me is evidence of the fact that we were paying an intolerable price for confusion about racism, and social justice generally—and the importance of identity, generally—and this is happening in an environment where the path to success and power for historically disadvantaged groups isn’t generally barred by white racists who won’t vote for them, or hire them, or celebrate their achievements, or buy their products, and it isn’t generally barred by laws and policies and norms that are unfair. There is surely still some of that. But there must be less of it now than there ever was.

The real burden on the black community is the continued legacy of inequality—with respect to wealth, and education, and health, and social order—levels of crime, in particular, and resulting levels of incarceration, and single-parent families—and it seems very unlikely that these disparities, whatever their origin in the past, can be solved by focusing on problem of lingering racism, especially where it doesn’t exist. And the current problem of police violence seems a perfect case in point.

And yet now we’re inundated with messages from every well-intentioned company and organization singing from the same book of hymns. Black Lives Matter is everywhere. Of course, black lives matter. But the messaging of this movement about the reality of police violence is wrong, and it’s creating a public hysteria.

I just got a message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science talking about fear of the other. The quote from the email: “Left unchecked, racism, sexism, homophobia, and fear of the other can enter any organization or community – and destroy the foundations upon which we must build our future.” Ok, fine. But is that really the concern in the scientific community right now, “unchecked racism, sexism, and homophobia.” Is that really what ails science in the year 2020? I don’t think so.

I’ll tell you the fear of the other that does seem warranted, everywhere, right now. It’s the other who has rendered him or herself incapable of dialogue. It’s the other who will not listen to reason, who has no interest in facts, who can’t join a conversation that converges on the truth, because he knows in advance what the truth must be. We should fear the other who thinks that dogmatism and cognitive bias aren’t something to be corrected for, because they’re the very foundations of his epistemology. We should fear the other who can’t distinguish activism from journalism or politics from science. Or worse, can make these distinctions, but refuses to. And we’re all capable of becoming this person. If only for minutes or hours at a time. And this is a bug in our operating system, not a feature. We have to continually correct for it.

One of the most shocking things that many of us learned when the Covid-19 pandemic was first landing on our shores, and we were weighing the pros and cons of closing the schools, was that for tens of millions of American kids, going to school represents the only guarantee of a decent meal on any given day. I’m pretty confident that most of the kids we’re talking about here aren’t white. And whatever you think about the opportunities in this country and whatever individual success stories you can call to mind, there is no question that some of us start on third base, or second base. Everyone has a lot to deal with, of course. Life is hard. But not everyone is a single mom, or single grandparent, struggling to raise kids in the inner city, all the while trying to keep them from getting murdered. The disparities in our society are absolutely heartbreaking and unacceptable. And we need to have a rational discussion about their actual causes and solutions.

We have to pull back from the brink here. And all we have with which to do that is conversation. And the only thing that makes conversation possible is an openness to evidence and arguments—a willingness to update one’s view of the world when better reasons are given. And that is an ongoing process, not a place we ever finally arrive.

Ok… Well, perhaps that was more of an exhortation than I intended, but it certainly felt like I needed to say it. I hope it was useful. And the conversations will continue on this podcast.

Stay safe, everyone.”

#sam harris #philosophy #politics #controversy

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therainroguefanfiction · 4 years

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Upcoming, Planned & To Do

This was updated on 7/23/20.

Here’s a list of shit I want to write, plan to write, or have written and just haven’t posted lol Btw, I use OC and she/her in these but that’ll be changed when I write it.

♟ General Stuff

Adding archive from wordpress (in progress)

♟ Upcoming

Sportember Writing Event (September)

Octkyuu!! (October Haikyuu Event)

Frightful October (Halloween Event)

♟ Requests

None

♟ Planned

Imagine stroking and gently scratching bakugo's back while the two of you cuddddleeeeeeeeeeeeee and then he falls ASLEEEPPPPP

https://bnhatrashh.tumblr.com/post/624391477041266688/imagine-stroking-and-gently-scratching

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Heart Beats #18: Lovers ~ When you return to the cabin, Atobe is awake. You explain what happened and everyone decides to go to bed. Before you can, however, he comments about how the two of you have become lovers. Choutarou flushes and Shishido pipes in thinking that being lovers means having sex, making Choutarou quickly deny the accusation. Atobe chuckles while you facepalm. Atobe then explains that lovers simply means ‘a person in love with another’.

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Unnamed, Akaya, Part 1 ~ Akaya needs to take a shower after finding himself the victim of a prank, but after hearing the high schoolers talking about how the shower room is haunted, he refuses to go alone. Everyone else is asleep, so he bugs you to go along with him. You plan on standing outside, but he demands that you stand watch inside. Halfway through his shower, a loud and eery moan fills the room. He screams and launches at you, his naked body pressing against yours as close as he could get it. You climb up the wall and pull a knife from your boot to pry the speaker from the wall, showing that he had gotten pranked.

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Unnamed, Akaya, Part 2 ~ Akaya was pranked again. You sit in his room while he strips down to his boxers, listening to him complain about why he keeps getting pranked. You simply tell him that it’s because he is cute and that if he stops reacting, they will get bored and move on. He now only has one pair of clean clothes left, so he begs you to wash his dirty clothes for him. Sanada walks in to find the half naked boy sitting on your lap and freezes, demanding to know what’s going on. He claims that you are corrupting the second year. Akaya doesn’t understand what the big deal is, and you simply state that there isn’t one because you’ve seen dicks before. Sanada, trying to hide his blush, yells at you and throws his balled up jacket, hitting Akaya in the face and sending him to the ground. Deciding to aid him, you quickly grab his clothes and head for the laundry room. He rushes to get dressed and follows, sitting ontop of the machine. Again, he questions what the big deal is, since you had already seen him naked and he trusts you. You suggest that he not tell Sanada that. Smut ensues.

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Unnamed, Mihashi ~ Mihashi is being bullied by some other kids in the park when you stumble across them. Being an ex-gangster, you were easily able to lift the kid off the ground and scare him shitless with just a few words. Mihashi is crying and apologizes for being so weak. You wipe his tears and give him your long sleeved shirt as it’s a bit cold outside. “There’s always someone stronger than you out there. Besides, if you get stronger, I wouldn’t get the chance to save you.” He smiles and your heart skips a beat. You ask if he’s ever had his first kiss and then ask if you can take it from him. He nervously agrees and you pull him close, sharing your first, of many, kisses.

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Unnamed, Marui ~ A high schooler named Murai develops a test syrum that turns Marui into a vampric assassin. After being injected, he passes out and is taken to the nurse’s office. Having had feelings for the boy for a while, you rush to the office as soon as you here and you quickly note the signs that he’s a vampire. After getting the nurse out of the room, you slice your arm and offer him a drink, shocking Niou, who had arrived with you. Since you are the first blood he’s had, he no longer smells the blood of others like a normal vampire does. Like a homing rocket set on a target - it ignores everything but the target.

Marui ends up having a nightmare about Murai and his roomates are unable to wake him so they grab you. Hearing your voice brings him back, but he is so upset that you grab him and bring him to your room to calm down. He explains that he had a nightmare about the man who turned him and that he had killed you. This is after over hearing your conversation with Niou about his condition. He’s hungry, but doesn’t want to leave a mark, so she removes her shirt and tells him to pick a spot. He chooses your upper left chest.

During a fight, you get a cut on your stomach. Marui smells your blood and comes running, licking the wound. Later, he is with Sanada and the others when he smells your blood again. His fangs appear and he slaps his hand over his mouth before excusing himself to chase after you. Murai sees him coming up behind you and gets excited, expecting him to attack, but instead he hugs you and kisses your back, telling you to be careful. You then take down Murai and learn how to cure Marui. This takes place during U-17.

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“Pyromaniac” I.M and Jooheon ~ Reader is childhood friends with Jooheon. She invites him and I.M to hang out in an abandoned building that’s rumored to be haunted. They decide to split up and reader, being a pyromaniac, plays with her lighter as she explores, flicking it open and closed repeatedly. When an ice cold hand grabs her shoulder, she drops the lighter and whips around, only to find nothing there. The hand grips her again and she whips back around to find some cloth on the floor now set ablaze with a transparent woman standing amongst them. She noped out of there, grabbing her friends on the way. The fire department was called and so was Shownu, who questions what happened. “I don’t understand how this could have happened.” to which I.M responds “My guess would be the pyromaniac but that’s just me.” Everyone stares at her and she only shrugs, claiming the fault of the ghost.

OC adopts a troubled high school freshman.

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Security guard falls for a high school student.

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OC has beautiful hair and always gets complimented but she cuts it and her friends start calling her ugly.

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Hetalia characters appear in the real world. OC opens the door despite being sick and China ends up staying with her.

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Mother is a perfectionist. OC is depressed. Mother complains she never does anything. OC tries. Mother complains she did it wrong and redoes it. OC stops trying and feels useless, wondering why she isn't good enough. OC cries in the park.

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OC suddenly gets sick and panics, Jisoo finds her having a breakdown in the bathroom.

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Super empath can take on the emotions of others just by talking to them and while comforting someone online, she takes on the depression.

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Betsy vs Daburi Skyrim oc face off dark brotherhood

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Just a prank bro

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thanksgiving fic

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Diablo from suicide squad

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guard for ri’saad, uses her for warmth

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simon cowell 139 dreams WIP

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keigo arranged marriage, runs away from home

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jingwoo goes to ny and gets attacked. his father is friends with the mayor and don, so svu gets the case, but oc has history with this one.

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mugger switchblade prompt with hiyoshi

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Always chapter 6

Drifting Away chapter 7

How Do You Love? chapter 5

Moving Metal chapter 7

Reaching Out chapter 5

Rise Above It chapter 48

Storm Coming chapter 5

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#to do #upcoming #requests #planned

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swanqueeneverafter · 5 years

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What Dreams May Come, Pt.18

Storybrooke. Present. (Greg Mendell returns to his room at Granny's Bed and Breakfast, only to discover Regina waiting for him.) Greg: “You know, I'm all set for towels... if that's why you're here. I air dry.” Regina: “I'm here because I realized why you look so familiar to me. It's because we have met before, haven't we? Owen. (Holds up Owen’s gift:) I kept this all these years as a reminder of our time together. You were just a boy when you gave this to me. (Approaches:) Now look at you, all grown up. No wonder I didn't recognize you.” Greg: “Yeah, but I-I recognized you, because you look exactly the same, Regina. It's as if no time has passed for you.” Regina: “Monthly juice cleanse. Does wonders for the skin. You could've come to me, Owen. You could've told me who you were and why you're here.” Greg: “Well, I-I think you know why I'm here.” Regina: “I honestly don't.” Greg: “I'm looking for my father.” Regina: “Your father? He left shortly after you did. I never saw him again.” Greg: “I don't believe you.” Regina: “Be that as it may, it's the truth.” Greg: “People don't just disappear, Regina.” Regina: “Scared little boys tend to have overactive imaginations.” Greg: “Well, I'm not a scared little boy anymore, Madam Mayor. It's taken me a long time to get back here. I'm not leaving without my father.” Regina: “I'm afraid you are, because he's not here. (Walks to the door:) I'll let Granny know that you'll be checking out tomorrow.” Greg: “Or what?” Regina: “Contrary to what you might think, people can just disappear.” Greg: (As Regina goes to leave:) "Congratulations, by the way. (She turns back:) On the pregnancy. I just hope for the sake of the baby, you and your wife can remain a family. Especially after she learns what you did to rip mine apart."

Enchanted Forest. Past. (Hook is standing outside Brennan’s house, holding a piece of paper, which will be Brennan's ticket for travelling safely. Hook pushes open the door to the small house and sees Brennan tucking his son in.) Son: “I'm scared, Father. I don't want to leave here in the morning.” Brennan: “I know. But we'll be okay. You and I will find another home. What matters most is that we're together. We can face anything that way. Now, it's late. Close your eyes. And remember... whenever you're scared, all you have to do is look... inside. We're all braver than we think if we just look deep enough. Sleep tight. I'll see you in the morning, Liam.” (Kisses Liam's forehead.) (Upon hearing the boy’s name, Hook retreats out of the house, but is clearly angry. Brennan exits the house a couple of moments after Hook does, and walks towards him.) Brennan: “Thank you, Killian.” Hook: “You named your boy Liam. After my brother, after the son... you abandoned. Was he really that easy to replace?” Brennan: “I wasn't trying to replace him. I was trying to honour him, to honour you both. So I'd remember never to make the same mistake. I promise, I’ve changed.” Hook: “No, people don't change. (Angrily points at Brennan in a threatening manner:) I saw what you said to him in there! It's the same thing you said to me! It was a lie then, and it's a lie now!” Brennan: “Killian, please, it's not true. I have changed. I would never leave him.” Hook: “But you would leave me.” (He puts the pieces of parchment that hold Brennan's ticket to freedom in the fire.) Brennan: “Killian, please, what are you doing?!” Hook: “Deciding what kind of man I want to be. You see, if the queen discovers that I've deceived her, I might not get what I need, and I can't have that. You're just not worth it.” (He pulls out a dagger from inside his coat, and stabs Brennan.) Brennan: (Grunts in pain, before falling to the ground. He tries to grab Hook, but is pushed away:) “Killian... it's never too late. You can change. Be a different man.” (Brennan gasps his last few breaths, then dies.)

Storybrooke. Past. (Regina enters the Marine Garage.) Billy: “So, what can I do to help, Madam Mayor?” Regina: “Kurt Flynn's car.” Billy: “The one you asked me to fix ASAP.” Regina: “Yes. Plans have changed. I now need Mr. Flynn and his son to stay a while longer. Perhaps you can take a couple extra days with the repairs?” Billy: “I'm afraid that Mr. Flynn already picked the car up.” Regina: “What? When?” Billy: “Ten minutes ago.” Mayor’s Office. (Regina is in her office. She pulls out Sheriff Graham's heart from a locked drawer in her desk and speaks into it.) Regina: “Sheriff. Our visitors are driving out of Storybrooke. Find them before they cross the town line, pull the car over, and arrest the father for drunk driving. Then bring the boy to me. (She turns around and sees Kurt standing in the doorway. She puts the heart back in its box:) Kurt.” Kurt: “Mayor.” Regina: “That wasn't what it sounded like.” Kurt: “I don't want any trouble. (Backing away:) Just came by to say thank you.” Regina: “Wait. It was just a misunderstanding.” Kurt: “No. I understood. We're leaving.” Regina: “I'm not going to hurt him. Please don't leave.” (Kurt starts to leave when Sheriff Graham enters and pushes him against the desk.) Kurt: “What are you doing?” Sheriff Graham: “I'm afraid you're under arrest for driving under the influence.” Kurt: “What? Drunk? I'm not drunk and I sure as hell haven't been driving.” Sheriff Graham: “Don't make this harder on yourself.” Kurt: (To Regina:) “What did you do to him? (To Sheriff Graham:) She's controlling you. I don't know how but she had this glowing thing. It was shaped like a heart. Don't listen to her.” Sheriff Graham: “And you say you haven't been drinking. (Kurt lunges forward and knocks the box with Sheriff Graham's heart inside it off the desk. Sheriff Graham falls back, and Kurt runs away:) What was that?” Owen: (Outside, Kurt gets in the car:) “Dad, what's wrong?” Kurt: “We got to get out of here.” (He speeds away.) Storybrooke. Sheriff's Station. Present. Emma's Office. (Sitting across from each other with the door closed, Emma waits for Regina to continue.) Emma: "What happened next?" Regina: "We, uh... Graham and I stopped them from crossing the town line." Emma: "Okay, so, what happened to Kurt? (Regina stares at Emma for a long moment, clearly not knowing how bring herself to say the words. Reading between the lines:) All right. Does this Greg... Owen - whoever he is, know this?"

Regina: "I don't think so. He said he was here to find his father. (There is a long, terrible silence between them, filled only by the sounds of Lily filing paperwork outside the office:) There's really no excuse for what I did. (When Emma doesn't meet her gaze, Regina nods to herself and stands. Turning, she reaches for her scarf and awkwardly pulls on her long coat:) I guess that nagging little thought of yours was right. Only, it wasn't our future that came between us, it was my past." (Before Regina can even reach for the door handle, she feels Emma's hand upon her shoulder.) Emma: "Do you really believe that I'm unaware of your past, Regina? (Regina closes her eyes:) Do you think I wasn't filled in on all of your evil deeds a long time ago? Everyone in this town has a story about you, about how you ruined their lives and ripped apart their families." Regina: "Then how could you-" Emma: "Because I love you. You, Regina Mills. The only person who really understands all of me. Maybe if I had known you in the Enchanted Forest, known you as the Evil Queen, things would have been different, but it doesn't matter. (Finally turning Regina to face her:) Do you know what I see when I look at you?" Regina: (Tears falling:) "What?" Emma: "You're Regina. My wife. The mother of my children, the love of my life. My life began when Henry came and found me and brought me home... to you. Maybe it’s just me being selfish, but hell, I think we’ve both earned that right. I will always be here and I will always love you, no matter what." Regina: (Shakily:) "I don't deserve you." Emma: "No, don't say that. Do you remember our vows? I'll forgive your past, if you forgive mine? There are things I'm not proud of in my past either, but being with you? Fighting beside you, loving you and our family, is the best thing I ever did. So it's going to take a lot more than Greg Mendell to tear us apart." Regina: "But, Emma, he's out there. Determined to find the truth and I-" Emma: "Don't worry about that. He made a mistake coming back here, but he made an even greater one when he tried to come between us." Regina: (As Emma grabs her jacket:) "What are you going to do?" Emma: "I think it's time to do something about the town visitor, and to make sure he never comes back." Granny's Diner. Exterior. (Greg Mendell walks out of the diner and down the steps. Constantly checking his phone, he glances around before heading down a side street towards his car.) Emma: (Following him around the corner:) "Mr. Mendell!" Greg: (Spins around immediately:) "Why the hell are you following me?" Emma: "I think we need to talk." Greg: (Seeing the gun in Emma's hand:) "Or what, you'll shoot me? No, I don't think so." Emma: (Raises her gun as Greg runs toward his car:) "Hey! Stop! (Greg jumps into his car and starts the engine:) Son of a-"

(As Greg speeds away, Emma runs back to her car to give chase.) Storybrooke. Past. (Kurt and Owen are driving through Storybrooke. Regina and Sheriff Graham are following them in a police cruiser.) Owen: “What's going on, Dad? What do they want?” Kurt: “We gotta get out of here. Come on!” Owen: “Dad!” Kurt: “Look out!” (Sheriff Graham swerves to avoid hitting an oncoming car.) Owen: “Dad! Faster, Dad!” Storybrooke. Present. (Emma is in hot pursuit of Greg, gaining on him quickly, knocking over a mailbox as she does so.) Storybrooke. Past. Kurt: (Approaching the town line:) “I think we lost them.” Owen: (Sheriff Graham pulls in front of them, blocking the road:) “Dad!” Kurt: (To Owen:) “Alright. Listen to me. Run away into the woods. Get away as far as you can. You call your uncle. Go.” Owen: “No. Not without you.” (He grips the lanyard key chain his father gave him.) Kurt: “There's a reason I gave you that. Because as long as you have it, I'll always be with you. You can do this. So do it. Run! Go! Go! Run! (Sheriff Graham opens the car door. Owen leaves the car and starts running towards the town line. Sheriff Graham tries to arrest Kurt, but Kurt fights back. Regina gets out of the police cruiser:) You may have this whole town wrapped around your finger. But not my son. You can't force him to stay with you!” Owen: (Stops:) “Dad!” Kurt: “Don't stop! Run! Run!” Regina: “Owen. (Approaching Owen:) It's okay, I'm not going to hurt you.” Owen: “Why are you doing this?” Regina: “I just want you to stay with me. You said you liked it here. You want to stay here, don't you?” Owen: “Not like this.” Regina: “I'm sorry. I just wanted us to be happy.” (She releases Owen and the boy runs off.) Kurt: (From inside the police cruiser:) “Run, Owen.”

Storybrooke. Present. (Emma is closing the gap between her car and Greg's. She almost pulls level with him until she sees the town line. Slamming on her brakes, Emma lets Greg go, watching as he speeds over the town line and out of their lives. Stepping out of the car, Emma walks right up to the line, breathing a sigh of relief as Mendell's car disappears into the distance. Turning at the sound of an approaching vehicle, Emma sees Lily arrive in a squad car.) Storybrooke. Past. (Owen is on the other side of the town line with two police officers.) Owen: “Here! This is where they took my Dad!” Captain: “There's nothing here, kid.” Owen: “No. No. This is where Storybrooke was. By this rock.” Captain: “Son, there isn't a town called Storybrooke anywhere in Maine.” Owen: “So you don't believe me?” Captain: “Look, you've been through a lot. (Owen runs closer to the town line:) Son!” Owen: “I'll find you, Dad. I promise! I'll never stop looking!” (On the Storybrooke side of the town line, Regina, hidden to Owen, touches to magical barrier keeping her from crossing.) Captain: “Come on son. Come on, let's go. It's okay.” (The officers lead Owen away as a tear falls down Regina’s face.) Storybrooke. Present. Town Line. (Emma sits in the police cruiser beside Lily.) Lily: "Emma, what were you thinking? You wrecked half the town!" Emma: "Trust me, it's better for everyone that Greg Mendell is gone." Lily: "Yeah, and what if he comes back? Only this time with a whole fleet of cops?" Emma: "He won't be back." Lily: "No? According to you, the guy was looking for his father. I haven't forgotten how it felt spending every spare moment I had looking for my birth parents, how about you? (Emma has nothing to say to this:) Look, I'll cover for you, but I think you need to step away for awhile. I know you were due to take some time off after the baby was born, so why not take it now?" Emma: "Are you gonna take my gun and shield too, officer?" Lily: "Hey. Friend to friend, you know I'm right."

#sq #swanqueen #swan queen

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pamphletstoinspire · 5 years

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A Great Catch: The 153 Fish

“I welcome you on the eve of a great battle.” So began General Dwight D. Eisenhower on May 15, 1944, solemnly addressing the admirals and generals and officers of the Allied Expeditionary Force, announcing the proposed strategy for Operation Overlord, codename for the Normandy invasion. Underestimated as an orator, Eisenhower’s speech riveted the attention of all in the tense atmosphere. The location was an unlikely one: a lecture hall of Saint Paul’s School in London. The boys had already been evacuated to Berkshire during the Blitz. The top brass, who had arrived from the advance command post of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Forces at Southwick House in Hampshire, were seated on school chairs, with two armchairs occupied by King George VI and Prime Minister Winston Churchill. General Bernard Montgomery, the future Field Marshall, brought out his maps to show the British and American positions. The school served as headquarters of the XXI Army Group under Montgomery, and he felt at home there because he was an Old Pauline. Planning took place in the office of his old Headmaster, or High Master, which was the title used from the day of the school’s foundation in 1509 by John Colet.

As a close friend of Erasmus, and an even closer spiritual advisor to Thomas More, Colet was the epitome of a Renaissance humanist, laden with learning he had brought back from France and Italy for lectures in his own university at Oxford. More lured him back to his birthplace of London where his father had been a rich merchant and twice Lord Mayor. As Dean of Saint Paul’s cathedral, Colet put his reforming principles to work with eloquent imprecations against the pride, concupiscence, covetousness, and worldly absorptions that had tainted the priesthood. Archbishop Warham of Canterbury dismissed frivolous charges of heresy brought against Colet by offended clerics. Colet’s combination of charm and audacity engendered the respect even of Henry VIII, despite his bold preaching against the king’s French wars. As a priest with no children of his own, and no nieces or nephews because all twenty-two of his siblings had died in childhood, Colet devoted much of his inherited fortune to founding Saint Paul’s school for teaching 153 boys literature, manners, and, with Renaissance flair, Greek on a par with Latin. Erasmus said that when Colet lectured he thought he was hearing a second Plato. If so, his Platonism was Christian. He wanted a great catch, similar to the 153 fish that the apostles had hauled in at the command of the Risen Christ. The boys would be welcome “from all nations and countries indifferently.”

The catch was great indeed, and since then the school has turned out graduates including, just for starters: John Milton, Samuel Pepys, John Churchill, G.K. Chesterton, three holders of the Victoria Cross, and the astronomer for whom Halley’s comet is named — all rising from the first 153.

Exegetes, sometimes with too much time on their hands, and even earnest saints, have teased 153 and other numbers into signifying possibly more than their meaning. Jerome tried to find some significance in the fact that the second-century Greco-Roman poet Oppian listed 153 species of fish in his 3,500 verses about fishing, the “Halieutica,” dedicated rather sycophantically to the emperor Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus. Of course, Oppian was wrong in his counting; besides, he wrote after the compilation of the Gospel. Augustine found that 153 is the sum if the first seventeen integers, which may reveal nothing more than his skill at arithmetic. In his devotion to the Rosary, Louis de Montfort found something prophetic between the catch of Galilean fish and the sum of fifteen decades of Hail Mary’s plus the first three beads.

There may be no end to such agile mental exercises, and I once wrote a book — Coincidentally — rather whimsically illustrating how it is possible to detect endless matrices if you try hard enough. For example, faddish New Age fascination with the esoteric numerology of Kabbalah cultism can strain minds. It may not have been a helpful influence on the popular singer who gave millions of dollars to a Kabbalah institute and recently was confined to a mental health facility purportedly against her will. Carl Jung wrote at some length about what he termed “synchronicity” and warned that an obsession with “acausal principles” could unbalance reason. Yet even a detached observer might pause at the fact that the Sacred Tetragrammaton appears 153 times in Genesis.

The point here is that there are many levels of meaning in divine revelation that may be clues to the operation of Divine Providence. “For I know the plans that I have for you, plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope” (Jer. 29:11). Even our limited mathematics may articulate something of the symmetry by which the pulse of Creation may be taken: “‘To whom then will you compare Me, or who is My equal?’ says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who has created these things, who brings out their host by number” (Is. 40:25). Perception of this saves the saints from madness and inspires them to awe.

Contemplation of the unity of the True God and True Man encounters layers of reality beyond the comprehension of human intelligence. Nonetheless, we can perceive the existence of those dimensions. A “Participatory Anthropic Principle,” first forwarded by John A. Wheeler, suggests that the universe is structured with a set of physical constants or “cosmic coincidences” without which there would be no intelligent life on Earth, and that it is only by participating in that structure by rational perception that the constants or coincidences have their potency. So there may be in those 153 fish the Voice saying: “I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12).

It would be a mistake to suppose that the apostles went back to fishing in disobedience to the Master’s command years before that they drop their nets and follow him. Christ is the Alpha and Omega, meaning that he is able to know everything from start to finish at the same time. Before the Resurrection, Jesus told the apostles that they would meet a man in Jerusalem carrying a pitcher of water, from whom they would rent an Upper Room: “So they went and found it just as Jesus had told them (Luke 22:13).” Thus he was also able to “set up” his men, ordering them to go to the Sea of Tiberius, knowing what he had prepared for them there, in order to instruct them.

In his humanity he did a domestic thing in cooking breakfast. In his divinity he predicted what the apostles would become. Whatever else may be encoded in the number 153, the fact is that this event happened, for had it been an oriental myth there would have been a million fish. This number was a detail never to be forgotten. Even when the youngest of them, the cadet of the Twelve, was the last to survive and his mind was weary with age, he said with a thrill like that of a youth: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life” (1 John 1:1).

There is one thing we know that prevents miniaturizing Christ as the best of men but only a man: “For in Him all things were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (I Col. 16-17). In him was an urgent appeal to the intellect, which for the Jew was a function of love and not confined to the brain, as is clear in the Resurrection appearance to Cleopas and his companion on the Emmaus road: “O foolish ones, how slow are your hearts to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” (Luke 24:25-26). Here was the culmination of his earlier rabbinical catechesis: “‘Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? And don’t you remember? When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?’ ‘Twelve,’ they replied. ‘And when I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?’ They answered, ‘Seven.’ He said to them, ‘Do you still not understand?’” (Mark 8: 18–21).

The unseen calculus that fascinated Oppian when counting fish in coastal Cilicia much more amazed William Blake when describing an imagined “Tyger” which certainly was not rampant in London: “What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” If there is substance to some anthropic principle in the play of numbers, it is found in the fact that after the 153 fish had been dragged to shore, a small fire was burning as Jesus asked Peter three times if he loved him. And Peter wept in remembering that by another small fire in Jerusalem he had said three times that he never knew the Man.

BY: FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER

From: www.pamphletstoinspire.com

#a great catch the 153 fish

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kpopfanfictrash · 7 years

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Dichotomy

Author: @kpopfanfictrash , as part of the Bound series with @underthejoon

Creative Content Contributor: @m00nk1ld FOR THIS FREAKING AMAZING MOODBOARD. I actually yelled out loud, the first time I laid eyes.

Rating: 18 + (explicit sex, road head, denied orgasm, dirty talk, hate sex)

Word Count: 14,566

Summary: You hate him. He hates you. It’s a fine line though, isn’t it – between love and hate? (Arranged Marriage!AU)

Everything sparkles under the light.

Seen from above, there’s a cold, dark sheen to the floor. The ballroom is elegant, designed to make an outsider feel small but you’re no outsider tonight. You’ve always been a part of this life and it’s this fact which makes you down the rest of your wine.

A string quartet plays in the background, the music soft and introspective. It’d sound is gentle, unlike the laugh of your husband. His is anything but, cutting easily above the eaves of the room. It’s odd, to think that word to yourself: husband. Especially when used in relation to wife.

You don’t feel old enough to be married. Though can anyone feel old enough to be married without a choice? The question is rhetorical, it exists without an answer because you know the answer is no. From the top of the balcony, you watch Taehyung speak to several important businessmen. Among them is his best friend Jimin, you recognize the sandy blonde hair from here. Taehyung doesn’t look at you, which you suppose is typical. Before now, you were together for most of the night and this is the first moment you’ve had to yourself since arriving.

Already, you know your father will be tapping his watch. He’ll glance your way, then at Taehyung, as though to say – not good enough. As though to say, try harder. You need to act as though you’re in love, convince everyone else – even if you can’t manage to convince yourselves. Heaving a sigh, you turn away from the room. The staircase downward is white, unlike the color of the floor. The white bleeds into the handrails, inked stains which twist and wrap along the railings. You count down in your head, descending into the room.

Ten – more seconds of silence. Nine – more seconds of not smiling. Eight – more seconds until meeting his gaze. Seven – more seconds before he looks down. Six – more seconds until you’re beside him. Five – more seconds until he grabs your hand. Four – more seconds until your palm starts to sweat. Three – more seconds until you’re wondering how you should stand, where you should look, what you should say. Two – more seconds until you swallow your pride. One – until you don a mask of composure.

When you reach Taehyung you smile, slipping your right hand into his. His fingers wrap automatically around yours, loosening when he realizes you’re present. His gaze drifts sideways and upon seeing you, he stiffens, before becoming the perfect picture of composure. “Y/N,” he nods, leaning in to brush cold lips to your cheek. “I missed you.”

Jimin smiles, lifting his glass and you nod at this, before surveying at the others. The entire point of tonight’s function is to see and be seen. Your father explained this to you very carefully beforehand. Your father – the mayor. Taehyung’s father – the chief of police. This whole marriage was orchestrated to solidify power; to relieve a city whose streets are rife with tension. It was appeasement for the mounting frustration of the people towards the government.

When you first heard the idea, you thought it ridiculous. The first time your father explained, you actually laughed out loud. Talking soon became persuasion though, and when all else failed, he begged. After that came the threats.

A glass of champagne is pressed into your palm and you stare into its depths and remember. You remember the crying, the yelling before eventually giving in to a broken promise. Taehyung stood by all the while, silent in the corner, as though he wished to sink in on himself and never return. As though he had already separated each moment before him, strung them back together in a new order and avoided the problem entirely.

You both said yes. You both said yes, and here you stand. Taehyung’s left hand held by yours; together, but separate. You’re next to one another, with no idea what the other is thinking. No idea what the other feels, what they want, what they need. Neither one of you cares though, at least not enough to ask.

The obligatory part of the evening is over, leaving you with the requisite socializing and mingling. Something which should also be ending soon, although who knows if it will. Taehyung is more social than you, often likes to stay late at these events. He could want another hour and, thinking this – you glance in boredom at the edge of the room.

You’re surprised when he leans down, lips brushing the shell of your ear. “Ready to go?” Taehyung murmurs.

You nod. When a waiter passes your side, you set the near-empty glass down on his tray. Taehyung shakes hands with Jimin as you smile; first at him, then at the other man in the group. Taehyung keeps his expression pleasant, voice deep and casual. You stand to the side, thanking the gentlemen for their generous donations. All the people you’re thanking are men, all of them cut from the same kind of cloth. God forbid, your fathers try to enact some diversity among their sponsors.

Taehyung’s arm slips through yours, pulling you towards the door. To everyone else, you seem like the perfect picture of marriage. An intricately crafted love story, one which appeared on the front page of each newspaper the day you became engaged. Taehyung, the city’s golden boy, son of the chief police officer. You, the darling of the political scene, known since you were in pigtails and hanging on the coattails of your father.

Now, though, the two of you are grown. Taehyung leads through the crowd, his one hand clasped protectively over yours. He doesn’t look back, and you don’t look at him. Instead you nod at your father, waiting until he waves goodbye. Your mother stands by his side, glancing worriedly at Taehyung before waving farewell.

You ignore them both, exiting into the lobby. It’s kind of her to worry, you suppose but in your mind it’s too little, too late. It’s not that Taehyung is a bad guy, really. He’s just not your guy. He hasn’t been, ever since high school. Ever since the two of you stopped being friends.

“Did you bring your coat?” Taehyung queries, bringing you back to the present.

Blinking, you realize you’re standing at the coat check. “Yes,” you arch a brow. “We came in here together, remember? You’re holding my ticket in your suit pocket?”

“How am I supposed to remember that,” Taehyung grumbles, fishing around in his coat. “Aha!” he declares, pulling out the two stubs. “These two,” he smiles pleasantly at the coat man, sliding them over the counter.

The gentleman nods, taking the tickets. Before he leaves, he glances at you and you wince, recognizing the coldness in your tone. Taehyung seems to realize this as well, smiling meekly while sliding one arm over your shoulder.

He drops a kiss to your collarbone, chuckling. “Sorry, darling. I would forget my head, if it weren’t screwed on straight.”

You smile, though the gesture is terse. “Don’t worry, sweetheart.”

Pacified, the man walks away and as soon as he’s gone, Taehyung releases his arm. He steps aside, looking down at his shoes because normally, the two of you are better than this. Typically, you’re better at fooling the attention of the public. This was a lapse.

Fiddling with his keys, Taehyung smiles when your coats are returned. Taking yours first, he helps you into it while you fasten golden buttons up to the edge of your chin. It’s easy to pretend, when he acts like this. It’s easy to imagine different circumstances, ones where Taehyung is a dutiful, attentive husband who loves his wife.

His wife, who’s just not you.

Your stomach turns when Taehyung leads you away, pushing open the front doors and stepping into the night. The car is already parked at the bottom of the stairs, Taehyung having handed his ticket to the valet minutes prior. As soon as you leave, a man rushes forward with the keys to your Audi R8, which Taehyung accepts gratefully to fasten onto his key chain.

“Thank you,” Taehyung smiles, sliding a tip into his hand.

It’s drizzling, chilled rain damp on your skin walking out to the car. Taehyung opens the side door first, helping you in – like he always does. He waits until your skirts are rearranged before shutting the door and lowering himself to the driver’s seat, glancing at you before pulling out into traffic.

“Ah,” Taehyung exhales, loosening his tie. His other hand he keeps firm on the wheel. “That was fucking exhausting.”

“Yep,” you mutter, leaning back to stare at the rain. “Not helped, really by that fuck up at the coat check.”

In the glass of the window, you see Taehyung’s jaw tighten. “Yep,” he grunts and when he switches lanes, he moves faster than necessary. “I love having such a supportive wife. It’s what I always dreamed about growing up.”

Shifting in the seat, you roll your eyes. “Dreams do come true, don’t they? I always dreamt I’d marry some sycophantic pants-wetter, who once cheated off my AP History exam.”

“Hey,” Taehyung yelps, glancing sideways. “I was fifteen! And I’m not a sycophant,” he grumbles, petulant. “You’re the sycophant.”

“You probably can’t even spell sycophant.”

“Yeah? Well, can you spell this.”

When you glance at him, Taehyung is holding up his middle finger.

“Nice. Classy.”

“You started it,” he mutters.

“Good fucking lord,” you exhale, sliding farther in your seat. “It’s like we’re still in high school.”

Taehyung turns up the radio, and that’s that. It’s his jazz playlist, meaning he’s done talking to you for the night. Taehyung knows you don’t particularly enjoy jazz, so this is his way of saying he doesn’t give a fuck.

Staring outside, you know it wasn’t always this way. Taehyung once was your best friend. All through elementary school, middle school, the first two years of high school – the two of you were inseparable, could barely be parted. It made sense, you suppose, given the amount of time you two spent together.

Whenever your fathers had meetings or rallies, there was Taehyung. At first, the two of you played together in playpens. Then on playgrounds. Then in basements, in bedrooms, sprawled out on couches while surfing the internet and arguing loudly over nothing.

You and Taehyung always argued, it’s one of the few things you ever agreed upon. Taehyung was loud even then, overly opinionated – so were you, but only once you knew someone. You never had a problem telling off Taehyung, though. He was just so honest, unflinchingly so. His bluntness and kindness was an unusual combination, one which typically inspired the same conduct from you.

That was back when you were friends. Your relationship unraveled a long time ago – sometime around the third year of high school. There were a lot of things which led to the break, though right now only two come to mind. Both of them occurred when you were sixteen, young and impatient, just starting to recognize boys could be something more than friends in life.

Your female best friends were Allison and Kelsey. Looking back on those friendships, you know them to be anything but. They were friends of convenience, nothing more since the three of you lost touch after high school and never looked back. Since you moved into the city, you honestly haven’t even considered looking them up.

The first breaking point was when Kelsey went on a date. It was a boy named Jinyoung, although he never called her afterwards. The date went to Kelsey’s head, made her act as though she knew things the two of you possibly couldn’t. She liked to lord this over both you and Allison at lunch.

“You know,” Kelsey sighed, expressing that youthful wisdom all teenagers have. “You should just ask him out, Allison. Guys are into that sort of thing, trust me.”

Trying to control your smile, you took a bite of your sandwich. In your opinion, asking someone out seemed like a person-by-person scenario. Blanket statements like, ‘guys like this,’ were always untrue; people couldn’t be so easily described. Kelsey wouldn’t be argued with though, couldn’t be because she had experience and you didn’t.

“For example,” Kelsey looked at Allison carefully. “You should ask out Taehyung, Ali. It’s so obvious that you like him. Do something about it!”

“I do not,” Ali gasped, hiding behind her trapper-keeper. “You’re just – don’t be stupid, Kels. I don’t like Kim Taehyung like that.”

You hadn’t been paying attention to the conversation before, but when Ali said Taehyung’s name, you choked. Kelsey slowly looked at you, watching you awkwardly swallow. “Taehyung?” you gasped, eyes watering. “Like – my Taehyung?”

“Yours?” Kelsey arched a brow. She looked – to put it nicely – like the proverbial cat which ate the canary.

When she said that, your face heated up. “I mean,” you backtracked. “He’s not mine. Of course, Taehyung isn’t mine. I just meant like, my friend. My friend, Taehyung.”

Both Kelsey and Allison looked at you.

“You sure?” Kelsey mused. “I don’t know. You do look at him a lot, Y/N. You stare at him, more like it. Doesn’t she look at Taehyung,” she queried, turning to Allison.

With a rather guilty look, Allison nodded. “Yeah. But like, they’re friends,” she smiled, attempting to be nice. “Taehyung and Y/N have known each other forever – since they were in diapers. Of course they’re not into each other like that. He doesn’t see her in that way.”

“Right,” Kelsey laughed, nodding. “He’d never.”

They moved on to a new topic – what Allison would wear to attract Taehyung’s attention – and you stared down at your sandwich, suddenly not hungry. The bread was stale, the lettuce wan and you blinked at your table, struggling to ignore the way your hands shook.

Gently, you slid them under the surface. Honestly, you rarely thought about boys in that way. In the way Kelsey and Allison spoke of, about getting dressed up and made up and taken out. There were moments though, times which always seemed to happen with Taehyung. He was different – ah, that sounded bad. You always knew he was different, but the fact was never important to you. He was male, nothing more. It was a non-essential piece of information which didn’t affect your friendship. He was just... Taehyung, he was your friend and he was a boy.

Recently you’d begun to wonder though, if there was something more. Sometimes his hand lingered too long, pulling you up from the ground. Oftentimes he stood at your locker, stared at you in a way which made your stomach twist round in knots.

Once, he buttoned up the top button of your uniform. “Do you want pervs to see?” he’d scolded, taking a step closer.

He was so close to you that you froze, unable to breathe while his gaze dipped from your eyes to your lips, then back up.

Sometimes, you thought about that day. The warmth of his body, so close to yours and the way he smelled, like aftershave and a boyish scent of cologne. You recognized the smell of aftershave, because it smelled like something your father would buy. It was a smell you never thought you’d recognize, never thought that you’d like but on Taehyung, you did.

You thought about this often, how his fingers slowed on that top button, how he attempted to stretch one moment into several. The way he let go, disappeared and you went to your homeroom, he went to his. Ever since then, the touch of his fingers on yours – you had been wondering.

“Why not?” you interrupted.

Allison and Kelsey looked up, surprised. “Why not?” Kelsey’s forehead furrowed. “What?”

“Yeah,” you blurted. “Why, uh – why wouldn’t he look at me like that?”

Allison and Kelsey exchanged a look. Allison seemed vaguely peeved by the question, and Kelsey shifted to face you head-on.

“Well,” she mused, cocking her head. “You’re in the friend zone. Guys like Taehyung only see people in two ways: girlfriends or friends. You already chose your list – chose that long ago. You can move from date-able to friends, but not the other way around.”

When she said this, you frowned. “That doesn’t sound right. Why?”

Allison only laughed, as Kelsey sighed. “Why, do you like him?” she asked, not very kindly. “Y/N, with an unrequited crush on her best friend. Awkward,” she tutted, “since I overhead from Jimin that Taehyung has plans to ask out Ali.”

“Really?” gasped Allison, while your eyes widened.

Though you remained silent, your head was spinning. Taehyung and Allison made no sense. He’d never even mentioned her, let alone said that he liked her – but then you hesitated. Jimin was Taehyung’s other best friend, so if he said he liked Allison, it was probably true. The thought made your stomach churn, words stuck in your throat.

Allison squealed, demanded to hear more details but you were still focused on Kelsey. You stared for a moment, horror sinking into you. If Taehyung liked Allison – you nearly laughed at the thought. What the hell were you doing? You must have misread things, when you thought that he liked you. All this time you’d been thinking of him, and he’d been thinking of your friend.

“I don’t like him,” you declared, overly loud. “I was just confused, that’s all.”

“You sure?” Kelsey tilted her head. “You don’t like Taehyung, not even a little? What if,” her gaze flicked up, over your shoulder, “he asked you out on a date? Would you say no?”

Your cheeks felt like they were on fire. You knew Kelsey was goading you, being a jerk to you on purpose but couldn’t help your reaction.

“Yes,” you ground out, spat through your teeth. “I would say no. Taehyung is my friend, nothing more than that – he’s literally the last person on the planet I would date. He’s not my type at all. I could care less if he asked me out.”

“Huh.” Kelsey leaned back and shrugged. “Fine. I guess you don’t like him.”

You just glared, breathing heavily – until the chair beside you dragged backwards and Taehyung flopped down, throwing his navy pencil case onto the table. He looked your way, offering a smile and watched unblinkingly while your heart sunk to your shoes. For a long, horrible moment, you imagined he’d heard. You thought that he had and, even though he didn’t like you that way – the thought alone was horrifying.

Then Taehyung grinned, the gesture casual – and your shoulders sunk down from your ears. He didn’t know, didn’t hear Kelsey insinuate you liked him. Crossing both arms, Taehyung propped both his feet on the bench and nodded, “What’s up,” he said to Kelsey and Allison.

That was the first moment.

The second moment came a week later. The end of school bell always rang at 3:10 PM and although your locker was a few hallways down from Taehyung’s, the two of you always met at his to walk home from school. Your parents insisted on this, since the subway was dangerous, even during day.

As soon as the last bell rang, you gathered your things from your locker and began the long trek down to Taehyung’s. He wasn’t there and, frown tugging at your lips, you began searching the neighboring hallways. You found him outside the guy’s locker room, surrounded by a group of boys he didn’t normally hang out with.

His shoulder was touching the cinderblock wall and Taehyung ran one hand absently through his hair. Walking closer, you clutched your books tight to your chest, about to tap him on the shoulder – when you saw what he was looking at and your hand fell to your side. You forgot the situation entirely, squinting your gaze through the crowd.

They were looking at a locker, the entire inside of which was covered in some sort of diagram. A pyramid, each row containing a girl’s face. The guys were arguing about it loudly, some of them rather heatedly.

“No! Jenna should be above Margot, below Jordan,” Jeff shook his head. “How can you even argue? Jenna has the whole ‘girl next door’ thing going for her – beyond hot.”

At this, Lou scoffed. “Please, ‘girl next door’ is overrated. If that vibe were so hot, then Y/N would be rated number one.”

At this, several guys laughed and you recoiled upon hearing your name. After following Lou’s finger down the map to the board – you finally found your name three rows down from the top. Eyes widening, you finally understood what you were seeing.

A ranking. It was Hawthorn High’s Hot One Hundred, based on the sole factor of fuckability.

“Yeah,” Bruce laughed, shaking his head. “Y/N is like, you know, I’d bang her. Sure, I would. But I’d fuck Allison ten times before that.”

Cheeks coloring, you took a step back. Hearing him say that about you was like a punch to the gut and you looked down at your body, wondering what about it was wrong. Maybe you didn’t dress super trendy or know what to do with your makeup – you were pretty though, you thought, or that’s what you’d been told.

“Let’s ask Taehyung,” Jeff declared, turning. “You’re her best friend. Who would you bang – Y/N or Allison?”

Taehyung hesitated.

You couldn’t see his expression from where you were standing, but he ran a hand though his hair. Taehyung only did that when he was either nervous or lying.

“I,” he started to say, then stopped. “Fuck.” Taehyung exhaled. “You can’t ask me a question that.”

Lower lip trembling, you swallowed – hard. You no longer wanted to hear his answer to the question and you turned, about to leave when Bruce’s next words froze your feet to the floor.

“Come on,” he laughed, overly loud. “Taehyung isn��t impartial. Everyone knows he’s so far up Y/N’s butt, he can’t see straight.”

The moment he said this, the other guys laughed. Bristling, you whirled around because even angry, even embarrassed – they couldn’t talk to Taehyung like that.

Taehyung’s shoulders stiffened and he shoved himself off the wall. “I am not,” he muttered. “I don’t give a fuck about her like that. We’re not dating, Y/N doesn’t like me that way. And I don’t like her, she’s not my type. Allison,” he nodded, turning around.

Taehyung’s eyes widened when he saw you.

The second your eyes met, yours filled with tears – and you just turned around and ran. From behind you came several oooo’s and Taehyung, you’re in trouble, but you just kept running in the opposite direction. Taehyung’s face was plastered across your corneas, that mental image of him, frozen in shock and horror.

You didn’t care about that. It meant nothing compared to what you felt.

Your books were tossed somewhere along the way. In order to lose him, you hid in one of the unused choir rooms until your mom came to get you from school. The entire way to your house, you refused to explain to her what was wrong. You just said Taehyung had to leave, and you didn’t want to ride the subway alone. Your mother eventually decided it was easier to accept this as the reason.

The next day at school, you avoided him like the plague. You also did this the day following, and the next. This kept going until Taehyung eventually stopped trying. Until the two of you became strangers, ones who barely nodded at each other when they passed in the halls. You forgot what it meant to know him. To understand him. This way was better though, because without Taehyung around, the sting of rejection was only a memory. An unpleasant memory, a hurtful one – but just a memory, nonetheless.

Until your parents brought you both together and you were forced into marrying him.

Glancing at him in the car, you see Taehyung’s lips are held tight in his anger. The streetlights flicker over him every few seconds, casting orange stripes upon the skin of his face. Taehyung has grown up well, it can’t be denied. He’s an adult now, as are you. The growth happened separately though, both of you becoming people no longer capable of recognizing the other.

If any feelings remain between the two of you, they’re bitter. Splintered friendship and hurtful words; youthful, unrequited feelings of love.

Exhaling softly, you return to your window. It’s the reason you often behave like enemies; speaking to each other in snipped words, masked emotion, sidelong glances. To act like you hate another is better than admitting the real reason – that you once meant the world, and now you do not.

Ironically enough, the outside world thinks it’s opposite.

Taehyung doesn’t bother to say goodnight. He sweeps up the stairs ahead of you, tie already off in one hand. You follow behind him, already mentally pouring yourself a cup of tea. It’s hard for you to sleep without it.

Once in your room, you slowly remove your jewelry. Unfastening earrings one by one to lay them out on the table. You stare at these for a moment, realizing they’re the ones you wore at your wedding. For most, you suppose this would be a happy memory. For you, it only brings to mind recollections of concealer and red-reducing eye drops. Makeup tricks by professionals, to hide how you cried the night before.

When you were younger, you imagined yourself getting married; imagined yourself as a bride, as a wife. The idea wasn’t always appealing to you, but sometimes it was. Even when you were younger, you imagined yourself to be in love. The concept of crying on your wedding day was limited to seeing your husband at the end of the aisle. You thought you might cry happy tears, excited tears.

Not tears of knowing you’d given everything up.

You wore a long veil that day. A veil which entirely covered your face, one Taehyung only removed to kiss you once at the altar. His expression was as tortured as yours, face just as ashy and when you kissed, it was just a swift peck of the lips. This, before he brought the veil down, shroud-like, over your eyes.

That was the first and only time you kissed. Well, that’s not true. You’ve kissed before in public, when the occasion demands it. Like tonight, when Taehyung brushed his lips to your shoulder; or on holidays, when mistletoe tends to appear and kissing is expected. Never in private, though. Never alone.

Exhaling loudly, you cross into your bathroom and wash first your face, then your teeth and body. Readying yourself for bed, your eyes are already fluttering with exhaustion. It’s been a long day, a tiresome day because it’s draining, to pretend to be happy. As you curl into your large, King-sized bed and stare out of your window – you try your best not to cry.

It’s early the next morning, when your alarm goes off. Rolling half-asleep from bed, you pad into the bathroom to pull on the first sweatpants you can find. The walk to the gym is cool, silent, only the streetlights breaking through the mist at your ankles.

Hiking your bag higher, you exhale out at the fog. Working out in the morning helps you to think, clears your thoughts and lets you start anew. You begin at the treadmill, running until you start to sweat. Until your breath labors and then you stop, moving on to the weights. Today is arms and abs, concentrating on these and ignoring the presence of everyone around you. You turn up the volume of your headphones, blast your eardrums into a dull sense of obscurity.

The movements sooth you, therapeutic and by the time you’re done, last night is nothing more than a dull, nagging ache. It still exists, still is hurtful – but not so much as before. Filling your thermos with hot water, you stick your capsule of tea inside and when you leave the gym, the sun is just starting to rise. It’s beautiful, peachy hues melting into the blue – and your phone goes off at your side, buzzing hard in your pocket.

Taehyung: Hello, Y/N. Just reminding you of our semi-weekly lunch. I’ll swing by your office around noon to pick you up, okay? [7:04 AM]

You exhale, walking fast towards your building. Every other week, you and Taehyung go out for lunch. It keeps up appearances – real life husbands and wives do things like that. Dates. Fingers flying over your keyboard, you send Taehyung a text back.

Y/N: That still works. I have a quarterly update meeting until noon. I can meet you in the lobby after that. [7:06 AM]

Taehyung: Sounds good. See you then. [7:07 AM]

Throwing your phone in your pocket, you push open your building’s front door. Lately, work has been the one place which feels like home. Your childhood home stopped feeling that way the moment your father demanded you marry. Nor does your current apartment feel homey; it’s still just a place you share with a stranger. No, work is the only place left which has even the tiniest semblance of yourself.

Walking through the lobby, you fish in your bag for your badge. This morning is your quarterly update meeting. A checkpoint where you review the numbers of last quarter’s G&A (General and Administrative) expenses, then forecast them out for the remainder of the year. It should be easy, considering you’re predicting the company will come in several million dollars under budget. This, due to excellent business controls on your end and above-average sales from the business side.

The first half of the morning is spent preparing, going over your notes with team members, since this will be your first time presenting to the executives alone. You’re nervous about this, which irks you. There’s nothing to be nervous about, and yet – sometimes nerves defy logic, sometimes things are scary enough simply due to their enormity.

As you’re entering the meeting your co-worker, Tim, catches you by the elbow. “You’ll be great,” he stage-whispers, smiling widely. “I know you know this, just thought you might want to hear it from someone else.”

You freeze, until he withdraws. Tim is good-looking, in that all-American kind of way, with dark brown hair and grey eyes. He can be overly flirty, but right now all you feel towards him is gratitude. As illogical as it sounds, it is nice to be appreciated. In an ideal world, your opinion would be enough. Your success would be enough, your self-worth would be enough.

This is the real world though, and humans crave the attention and approval of others. It’s nice to feel someone notices – even if it’s not the person whose approval you crave. Thinking this, you hesitate. It’s not that you crave Taehyung’s approval. He’s not even the person you’re thinking of – you don’t know where his name, his face came from when you thought that.

Brushing this aside, you smile at Tim. “Thanks,” you respond, walking into the meeting. “Hope this goes well,” you nod, taking a seat.

Still, you can’t force Taehyung’s face from your mind. It meant nothing, just a remnant of a memory since you recently thought about high school. That memory dredged up feelings, that’s all. The memory of Taehyung as a friend, a crush – the thought makes your heart twist, but it’s been a long time since then. Swallowing, you look down at your computer screen.

Tim nudges your side. “I think your phone just buzzed,” he whispers. The last people are now entering, chatting eagerly about next quarter’s promotions. “You might want to turn it off before the meeting.”

“Thanks,” you nod, reaching for your phone and checking its settings. You freeze at the sight, reading the name that’s displayed.

Taehyung: Good luck this morning. I know you’ll kill it. [10:29 AM]

You don’t have time to digest the message before your CEO walks in. Hastily clicking the power button, you slide your phone back in your pocket.

The meeting is long. Staring at the clock on your laptop, you tap your foot impatiently against the ground. Your portion of the meeting went well – great, even. Your CEO only had a few follow-up questions, all of which were easily answered. She even went so far as to smile – a practically unheard-of affirmation. Tim squeezed your knee, at that.

HR is presenting right now and the company isn’t as far along with training as it should be, meaning some people are now struggling to come up with answers. The argument drags on, currently five after noon. If you know Taehyung – and you do know Taehyung – he’s probably shifting impatiently in the lobby.

Taehyung is many things, but patient is not one of them. You likely have one more minute before he decides to come upstairs himself. Taehyung knows everyone in this city, it wouldn’t be hard for him to get a visitor’s badge but it’s just as you think this, the CEO stands. Shaking her head, she suggests a follow-up meeting to solve the unresolved issue. Everyone agrees, and they begin to file out.

You’re one of the last to go, since Tim keeps you behind with his questions. Mostly on the presentation, but he keeps leaning in awfully close to you while he talks. One of his hands keeps on touching your elbow – you glance down at this while you speak, barely containing your surprise. Staring for a moment, you glance back at his face but Tim appears earnest, eyes wide with sincerity and you wonder briefly if you’re just making too big a deal.

It’s nice to feel appreciated, but as far as Tim knows, you’re married. He’s standing very close to you right now, given that fact. Close enough for him to see the vintage gold band sitting tight on your finger and despite knowing you’re a married woman, he’s acting awfully, well –

“Baby!” Taehyung calls, sauntering into the room.

You look up, startled by his presence and Tim springs away, cheeks flushed with embarrassment. When he meets the gaze of your husband, a knot loosens in your stomach, eased by Taehyung’s arrival.

This is strange, since usually it’s the sight of your husband which curls your stomach in knots. Rushing to greet him, you meet Taehyung in the center of the room.

“Hi, sweetie,” you smile and for the first time you can remember, the gesture is genuine.

Taehyung smiles back but when he looks over your shoulder, his gaze hardens.

“Kim Taehyung,” he says, reaching out a hand. He and Tim greet each other like this, their gesture brisk. “So, you’re the man keeping my wife from our lunch.”

Tim blinks, his face gone suddenly slack. You really can’t blame Tim for his reaction; Taehyung tends to have that effect on people. In addition to his father being the chief of police, Taehyung owns the same company he works for. Software engineering, some tool he developed while serving in the military which tracks foreign fluctuations of currency. Nearly every business in the world uses it, now.

Taehyung continues to smile, though the gesture doesn’t quite meet his gaze.

“Mr. Kim.” Tim nods. “Tim Carmichael. I was just debriefing with Y/N after our meeting. She led a very successful presentation, you should be proud of her,” he adds, a slight edge to his voice.

Your eyebrows shoot up. It’s bold of Tim to issue a challenge to Taehyung. Because that’s what he just did – issue a challenge. From the way Tim stares at Taehyung, from the way the latter stares back – well, you’re just surprised nobody has whipped out their dick yet.

Taehyung arches a brow. “I am proud,” he nods, keeping his tone light. “I sent Y/N a text saying as much. Did you get my message, darling?” he asks, glancing sideways.

Stifling a smile, you nod. “I did indeed, buttercup.”

The corner of Taehyung’s lip twitches at the nickname. “Excellent. Well.” Returning to Tim, he nods. “It was great to meet you, Jim.”

Without waiting to be corrected, Taehyung tugs you out of the conference room. You let him do so, laptop held tight to your chest as you mouth goodbye in the direction of Tim.

“Let me just put this in my office,” you say, and Taehyung nods.

“I’ll come with.”

You’re surprised by this, but you agree. It’s the first time Taehyung has asked about anything to do with your job, barring the random text he sent you this morning. As you walk down the hall, you’re acutely aware of his presence. His hand swings too close to yours, close enough that you could wrap your fingers around his, if you wanted. Not that you want that.

“Well,” you say, turning the corner. “This is it. My cubicle. It’s not that big, but I have a corner and a window – coveted real estate, in terms of the office.”

Taehyung doesn’t speak, wandering in. He looks around your cubicle, spotting the personal touches you’ve added. A hockey calendar, a vase full of (fake) flowers, a few brightly colored post-it notes and stamps. There’s a message written in blue sharpie, scribbled to read, “Y/N once ate twelve goldfish. No more, no less.”

Taehyung turns around. Plugging your laptop into its docking station, you watch him turn towards your bulletin board. Here, you’ve hung more messages, alongside the photos – two of them are of Taehyung; one is your official wedding photo, the one displayed in the lobby of your home. You both stand stiff and awkward, posed with forced smiles upon your faces.

The other though, was an impulse add. You aren’t entirely sure what made you do it, just that when you did, it felt wrong to remove it. The photographer took a lot candid shots that day, but only a few of them turned out well. This is one of those and it’s of Taehyung, though you’re unsure when during the night it was taken.

He looks off in the distance, staring at someone or something out on the dance floor. It’s funny, because all that night, you can barely remember your husband. All you remember is you, your own feelings; the pain that you felt, the fear that you had – all of your anger, your resentment. You always thought Taehyung felt the same but then there’s this photo, which seems to disprove that. He looks happy. More than that, he seems euphoric. Taehyung smiles at something, eyes and fingers gentle holding a glass of champagne.

His eyes are misty, that look you always dreamt your husband would have when you came down the aisle. It’s impossible to see what he’s looking at, though – you’ve tried often enough.

Taehyung lifts a hand to touch the edge of the photo.

“I,” you hesitate, looking over his shoulder. “I thought it might be good for appearances.”

When you speak, Taehyung stiffens and he looks back over his shoulder. “Sure. Makes sense.” He says nothing more, just sticks his hands back in his pockets. “Ready for lunch?”

Nodding, you pull your purse higher. “Lead the way.”

When Taehyung leaves, you follow, wondering what – if anything – just happened,

Lunch is odd.

Taehyung isn’t rude to you, nor is he cold. He seems distracted though, which is the strange part. He even leaves the table at some point, claiming a work call – something he almost never does and when he returns, Taehyung is almost pleasant to converse with.

“You got my text, right?” he asks, around a mouthful of chicken.

You nod, cutting into your plate. “Yes. Thank you. That was,” you quirk a brow. “Unexpected.”

“Yeah,” Taehyung looks down. “What was that you said in your office? About appearances? Got to keep them up.”

“Right,” you nod and you would let it go – but, “keep up appearances by sending a text to my cell phone?” you respond, arching a brow.

Taehyung blushes, shrugging it off. “There’s a function this weekend our parents want us to attend.”

He’s changing the subject, but you let him. “Perfect,” you nod, setting down your fork. “What disease or third-world country will be helped by our raffle tickets now?”

“Ah, no,” Taehyung wags a finger, fighting back a smile. “By silent auction, this time. Much more helpful.”

He rolls his eyes, and you know he agrees. Taehyung has traveled the world, served in those very troops the auctions try to help – you know privately, he holds a much different opinion than his parents. Even when you were friends, he was like that. Taehyung was a part of every club, forum and relief effort. That’s just who Taehyung is, what he’s like – loud, opinionated and overall, a good person.

At least, you used to think that was so. Staring down at your drink, you gently stir the ice cubes and Taehyung’s gaze follows the motion. “What are you thinking?” he asks.

You look up, startled. “I,” you start to say – then stop, when the waiter approaches your table.

“Mr. Kim,” he bows. “I have a man on line one for you. Would you like to take the call here, or on your cell?”

Taehyung frowns, placing his napkin on the table. “About what we spoke on earlier?” The man nods, and Taehyung stands. “I’ll be just a minute,” he explains, before leaving.

He’s gone for longer than a minute. You think he’s forgotten about you, gone for so long you finish your food and finally, you signal the waiter for the check. “Could you place this on my card,” you ask sweetly, handing over the object. “My husband was pulled away on urgent business, and I need to return to the office.”

“Of course,” the other water nods, taking the object. “Right away, Mrs. Kim.”

You sigh, watching him go and Taehyung returns just as you’re signing the check. His gaze darkens at the sight. “What are you doing?” he demands.

“Paying,” you mutter, adding a flourish. “There. All set,” you stand, smiling back at him. “Ready to go?”

Taehyung glances, dumbfounded, from his empty plate to yours. “I – no? Where’s my lunch?”

“Here,” you grin, handing over the white paper bag you’re holding. “I had them wrap it up. Now let’s go, I can’t be late for my 1:30.”

“You,” Taehyung starts to say but when you walk past the table, he follows. “Fuck, Y/N. You could have at least put it on my tab. You didn’t have to pay.”

“I’m perfectly capable of paying,” you respond stiffly, shoving open the door. “I’m not destitute, thank god.”

Taehyung places a hand on your back, putting on his public-facing smile. “That’s not what I meant,” he hisses, eyes flashing. “I know you do well for yourself. I’m your husband, though. It’s my duty to provide for –"

“Duty?” you snort, whirling around to face him. Taehyung’s eyes widen, nose only inches way. “It’s also your duty, to consummate our marriage. Do you want to do that too, husband?”

Taehyung raises a brow, as though fighting back laughter. “Yes. I do.”

Rolling your eyes, you push past. “Oh, fuck off,” you mutter, walking away.

Taehyung follows, catching up to you easily. “If you’d like, we can fuck off together,” he suggests cheerfully.

Your cheeks color, though you try and hide it. “Like you’d even be able to get up.”

From the corner of your eye, Taehyung freezes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Look,” you sigh, turning around. You’re standing in front of your building, steps away from the entrance and Taehyung looks at you, genuinely baffled. This is dangerous territory; too close to high school, your friendship and the day things went wrong. “Just forget what I said,” you exhale, shaking your head. “See you tonight.”

You don’t wait for his response before entering security. Taehyung doesn’t follow, but you didn’t expect him to and your stomach sinks, while the elevator climbs. Entering your cubicle, you throw your bag onto your chair, staring up at the board and that picture of Taehyung.

You don’t know why you feel embarrassed, it’s just a photo, but when you reach up to yank it down, you find your hand hesitating. You can’t do it and very slowly, you turn back around. Rubbing your temples, you stare blankly at your computer and try not to think about why.

When your screen turns on, you see you have several missed emails, requests which eat up the majority your afternoon. Between one task and the next, all thoughts of Taehyung fall from your mind and it’s much later that day, when you get a ping from a friend, your co-worker, Mo.

Clicking the open button, you quickly scan her message – eyes widening, as you scan it again.

Mo: Did you hear Tim is switching departments?? He’s starting in HR, effective immediately. [4:10 PM]

Y/N: what??? Are you sure? [4:12 PM]

Mo: Yep. His desk is already moved and everything. I think it’s to help with that training project? Idk for sure, though. [4:14 PM]

Y/N: whoa. Crazy. Gahhh, this is going to suck. Without Tim our team will have to pick up so much slack. [4:15 PM]

Mo: lol “our team” – meaning, you. [4:17 PM]

Y/N: yep [4:18 PM]

When your boss enters the cubicle, you shut the chat. He exhales. “So. You’ve heard about Tim, huh?”

You nod, and the two of you proceed to talk for the next hour. What holes Tim will leave, how to best cover the work until you find a replacement. By the time your boss leaves, it’s nearly time to go home and you rub at your eyes, shaking your head side to side. It’s too much to think about for tonight, so you pack up. Throwing both laptop and charger into your bag, slinging this and your gym bag over your shoulder.

Taehyung works late, so you don’t see him it all.

This weekend’s function is even dressier than the last; full-length gowns and tuxedos only. When you walk into the foyer, moving slow due to your heels, Taehyung is already waiting for you at the bottom.

He glances up, hearing movement – then stills, one hand slow on his cuff links.

“Wow,” he murmurs when your right heel touches wood.

You falter, uncertain what to do with the compliment. You’re aware you look good, or at least you think that you do. You’ve always thought you were fairly attractive; it’s Taehyung who never has. He’s looking at you now though with an expression that’s hard to decipher.

When you walk closer, he holds out a hand. “A beautiful dress,” he states, forcing your heart to sink.

A beautiful dress, not that you’re beautiful. Nodding, you accept his hand. “Let’s go,” you mutter.

Tonight’s function is much like the others. Another beautiful ballroom full of bored inhabitants. Taehyung is correct – this time it’s an auction, one you listlessly bid at. You stare at the numbers on the page, then set the pen down to the side and turning into the crowd, you scan the room. Taehyung is here, somewhere but after the requisite couple introductions, the two of you broke apart. He went to socialize with the businessmen and left you to socialize with the wives. Gritting your teeth, you accept a passing glass of champagne.

Tonight there’s a band instead of the usual quartet. The music is livelier and shockingly enough, there are actual people dancing, which is rare, at events like these. When you finish your first glass of champagne, you grab another, wandering to the edge o the dance floor to sip quietly and watch the colors whirl by.

Bitterness tinges your glass; something you swirl and swallow along with your pride. You want that, too – you want a partner, someone to dance with. Someone who cares for you, who you care for back. Someone who – cutting off that though, you look down at your drink.

Once upon a time, you thought Taehyung could be that person. When you were still young, still naïve and hopeful. Back before you’d kissed anyone, dated anyone, had sex, or fucked or made love to anyone. Before all that, there was Taehyung.

Maybe that’s why you’re bitter. Maybe that’s why you can’t look him in the face, can’t touch his hand without anger tightening your chest. Maybe it’s not anger at all but the fact that you once thought Taehyung would be yours, and he is – but not entirely. Having him as a husband is like a pill, one which both of you hate to swallow. Seeing him in your home is a constant reminder that he’s only there because he was forced.

You’re reaching for your third glass of champagne when a hand closes over your wrist.

“I think that’s enough,” Taehyung interrupts, gently pulling your body to his.

Blinking upwards, you suck in your breath. He’s beautiful – you hate that.

“You don’t own me, Kim Taehyung,” you mutter, throwing his hand from your wrist to push past. “It’s not like my father gave you seven herds of cattle in exchange for my hand.”

Taehyung lets you walk away, then waits a moment before following. “11 million dollars? I think not,” he says, grabbing the next glass you try to consume. He tips this backwards, draining it all in one gulp. “He did give me your hand, though. And I gave you mine.”

This makes you pause, turning to look at him. Maybe it’s the champagne, or maybe you’re just fed up but for some reason, you take a step closer.

“You gave me your hand?” You tilt your head. “Gave implies consent, desire. From what I remember, I’m not your type of girl.”

There’s a bite to your words, years of repressed anger and hurt layered between them. Confusion flashes across Taehyung’s features and he frowns, stepping forward. It’s strange, you think, tilting your head back to see him. You’re not sure when he got to be so tall.

“Are you fucking Tim,” Taehyung says, voice low.

“What?” The thought is so absurd, you can’t help but laugh. “Why would you even ask me that?”

Taehyung tilts his head to one side. “Answer the question. Are you sleeping with Tim?”

“No,” you sputter – then freeze, realization dawning. “Are you – are you saying you fuck other people?”

Taehyung’s eyes widen. “Other,” he repeats, looking away. His expression is bitter. “Kind of hard to fuck others, Y/N, when we’re not having sex in the first place.”

His words are like a slap and you visibly recoil.

“Shit,” you exhale. The word is cold, hard – entirely unlike yourself. “Fine,” you demand, scanning the dance floor. “I should’ve assumed. We’re married, but only in public – right? In private, we can do what we want. I guess I should catch up. Hm,” you muse, thoughtful. “Who should I ask, I wonder? Maybe Yoongi, he’s hot. Imagine what his face would look like, between my thighs. Or maybe Jimin. He looks like he knows how to fu–"

Taehyung growls, pulling you sideways. Ducking into an alcove, you find your back pressed to the wall while his hands find your hips. “Don’t,” he gasps, squeezing his eyes shut. “Don’t say things like that.”

“Taehyung,” you stare at him in concern. “What are you –"

He cuts you off when he kisses you.

Whatever protest you had dies on your lips as your mouth parts beneath his. Kissing Taehyung is like kissing fire; wild, unbridled and entirely out of control. His hands roam everywhere, his lips molten and needy. He presses you backwards and, not caring about lipstick, drags your lower lip between his teeth.

Your knee is yanked roughly upwards, your chest flush to his. Taehyung rolls his hips against you, letting you know exactly what he’s thinking while his mouth drops to your neck. He sucks, pulling skin between his teeth as you gasp out his name. He seems frustrated, agitated – and you’re equally pissed.

“Goddamn Yoongi,” Taehyung growls, hips thrusting. “Or Jimin. You think either of them can fuck you better than I can?” His lips slide down the curve of your throat. “You think either of them can make you come like I could?”

“I wouldn’t know,” you groan, head hitting the wall. “We’ve never even kissed before tonight.”

“And whose fault,” Taehyung exhales, kissing up your neck, “is that?”

Before you can ask what he means by this, he returns to your lips. His next kiss is harsh, unyielding while his hands slide down your body. Taehyung groans, cupping your ass and pressing himself to you, hard and wanting between your legs.

“Home,” he mutters, pulling away. “I hate that dress.”

You don’t disagree, following him on the dance floor.

Taehyung pulls you before him, speaking low in your ear. “You’re my wife,” he mutters, erection digging into your hip. “If you need to be fucked, I’ll do it.”

“I swear to god,” you hiss back, voice rising. “If you say that I belong to you – one more time.”

“You belong to me,” Taehyung says softly, before shoving open the doors to the night.

He tugs you with him, barely pausing before he’s clicking the keys in one hand. Taehyung scans the parking lot, tugging hard on your grip.

“What, no smart remark,” he murmurs, nibbling on your ear. His hand splays flat on your stomach, inching it’s way lower.

You spin around, pushing him until his back hits the wall. As you slide your hands into his hair, you kiss him fiercely; body arching to make him feel the full extent of your need. Taehyung moans, the noise harsh while you tug at his hair. Sliding your tongue into his mouth, you open him further – and then pull back abruptly, walking away down the steps.

Taehyung chuckles from behind, the noise dark and doesn’t follow at first – before cursing softly and pushing off of the wall. At the side of the car, Taehyung waits until you’re inside, like always. Then he enters on the driver’s side, getting in to lock the doors.

“Listen,” he growls, placing the car in reverse.

You press your legs together. “Yes?”

“I’m going to get us home,” he explains, arching a brow. “Fast. While I do that, I want you to suck me off. Can you do that for me, baby?”

Though your eyes widen, you shift in your seat. “You… what?”

Taehyung looks over at you, smirks. “I want my cock down your throat. Does that sound good, darling?”

Maintaining eye contact, you slide one hand up your body. Undoing your up-do, you let your hair fall to your shoulders and upon seeing Taehyung’s eyes darken, you bend your head forward. Without saying a word, you undo the zipper of his pants and find Taehyung already hard, straining against the confines of his navy boxer-briefs. You inhale at the sight, sliding a hand up his shaft before pulling down his boxers entirely.

Leaning down, you gently take the tip of his cock in your mouth. Just the head, nothing more. You suck on this gently, teasing his slit while Taehyung groans, his head hitting the seat.

“Fuck,” he hisses as you move lower.

When you let him in deeper, you relax your jaw just enough that his cock finds the back of your throat.

“God, yes,” he mumbles, hands clenched on the steering wheel. Taehyung’s eyes narrow in concentration. “Fuck, your mouth is so amazing. You’re so good at sucking cock.”

At this, you pull back. Sliding off with a pop, you settle back to your side of the car and Taehyung looks up, alarmed. Then down, at his rock hard cock. “What the –"

“I’ll finish you when we get home,” you smirk, batting your eyelashes. “That’s what you get, for saying I belong to you.”

Taehyung’s hands tighten, accidentally jerking the wheel. He straightens the car out, glaring in your direction.

“When we get home,” he says to you quietly. “I’m going to fuck you so hard, you won’t be able to walk in the morning. I’m going to eat you out until you can’t remember your own name. I won’t let you come, though,” he announces, switching gears. “No. You won’t come until your tight, little pussy is wrapped around my cock. Until I’m fucking you into your headboard and you’re begging for release.”

Arching a brow, you meet his gaze. “I’ll never beg, Kim Taehyung.”

A wicked smile crosses his lips. “We’ll see.”

Taehyung parks in the garage. Sliding into the last spot and unbuckling his seat belt. “Outside,” he demands, and you obey – but only because you want to.

Leisurely stepping from the car, you saunter towards the elevators and Taehyung catches you halfway, pulling you against his chest. He slides both hands down your body and you bite your lip in response. He’s hard enough that you groan, swatting his arm.

“Taehyung,” you scold, pushing past.

He lets you, following close behind and the second the elevator doors close, you’re the one attacking him. You shove him backwards, kissing him hungrily, hurriedly. One of your hands slides to his balls, your lips moving in tandem as Taehyung shoves his hips forward, grabbing hold of your hand when the elevator dings.

He walks you both backwards, continuing to kiss as you enter the foyer. Taehyung isn’t gentle, isn’t soft – but neither are you. You’re pushing the jacket from his shoulders, tugging at his cummerbund and throwing this on the ground. Taehyung is just as needy, insistently pushing you up towards the stairs.

“Turn around,” he demands, waiting until you obey. When you grab the banister, bending over, he groans out loud. Taehyung steps forward to press his cock to your ass. “Do you feel how hard I am,” he murmurs, lips moving from neck to nape. “Do you see,” he breathes, fingers tugging at your hidden zipper, “how fucking crazy you make me?”

He flips you over, sliding the straps down your shoulders until silken material pools on the floor. Your dress is floor-length and beneath it, you’re wearing the requisite lingerie. Lace; skimpy enough that Taehyung’s pupils to dilate, hands shaking while they slide down your body.

“Fuck,” he mutters, lip held between his teeth.

His own shirt is forgotten, but no longer. Your fingers make quick work of the buttons, tugging this back – and you pause. It’s been a long time since you’ve seen him like this. Of course you’ve seen Taehyung at pool parties and the gym, but this is different.

One other time comes to mind, back when the two of you were still sixteen. A time you barged into his house without asking, yelled hello to his mother and ran up the steps of his house to visit his room. You pulled open his door, not bothering to knock – and saw Taehyung, one hand down his pants, eyes scrunched up with pleasure as a soft groan fell from his lips.

You froze.

You weren’t supposed to be there, you knew that – but fuck, if you weren’t amazed by the sight. Seeing Taehyung like that sparked something within you, something dark, exciting and hot in your veins. You were embarrassed, yes, but it was more than all that. You felt warm, foreign, heavy with want, hazy with desire – until he opened his eyes.

They locked with yours for a second. Just one before you yelped and turned quickly away. Covering your face with both hands, you shook with laughter and nervousness while Taehyung nearly fell off his bed. The two of you decided it was best never to speak of it again. Best to ignore it entirely – but from that day forward, it was impossible. You kept on seeing him like that. His expression ecstatic, hands shifting, lips open.

Taehyung drops his shirt to the ground and then bends, picking you up by your thighs. He wraps your legs tightly around him as he walks up the stairs. His lips find your neck, sucking a hickey that has you grinding your hips. You enter the first bedroom on the landing – his bedroom – only to be deposited on top of his dresser. Taehyung takes a step closer, stopping between your legs to drag his thumb over your breast.

“What now,” he murmurs, not looking for an answer. His other hand yanks you closer, cupping your sex. “You’ve been naughty, Y/N,” he teases, finger slipping past your panties to push it’s way inside. “You were such a tease to me in the car – do you know what I do with teases?”

Shaking your head no, your fingers grip the edge of the dresser. Taehyung’s finger slides in and out, even while you grind yourself messily into the palm of his hand. Taehyung withdraws as you whimper, but then he drops to the ground; kneeling gently, to slide both hands up your legs.

He finds your panties, hooking both fingers to pull them lazily down and once they’re discarded on the floor, he spreads your legs. “What a pretty cunt,” he murmurs, kissing up your thigh. Taehyung bites, then kisses and then bites again. “I bet you’d like me to eat you out, yes?”

You glare at his head, refusing to give in. “If you like.”

Taehyung chuckles, pushing your knees apart. He doesn’t say anything, just kisses until – ah. You stifle your gasp, shifting your weight onto your hands. Taehyung begins gently, trailing soft circles around your sex. Easing you to him, warming you with his mouth before yanking you forward. His arms pin your legs to the dresser, forcing you still while his head buries between your thighs.

“Taehyung,” you gasp, as he eats you out. He flicks his tongue down, flattening and dragging. Interrupted only by the sucking and teasing, as his finger slides back to where you’re wet.

When he pushes this finger inside, you can’t help your noise. It feels too good, him brushing against your already-sensitized walls. It’s been so long since you’ve had sex and it’s just different with someone else. Different with the heat of his mouth, the roughness of tongue, the feel of his hands. Different with Taehyung grunting and groaning at every inch, glancing up occasionally with a smirk on his face.

He continues like this, finger fucking you, driving you crazy until you’re clenching around him. Until you’re whining, pressing your hips messily upwards and that’s when Taehyung pulls out to stand quick from the ground.

You freeze, body tight and trembling. The sudden loss of him is painful, dangerously close to your edge – and you let out a swear, followed by a string of vibrant curse words. “Kim Taehyung,” you hiss, pushing yourself up. “You better fucking get back down there. Or I swear to god.”

“Not so fun?” he smirks, unzipping his pants. You stare, when he drops these to the floor. Taehyung is hard, straining against his underwear while your mouth starts to water. “Suck my dick, and I’ll make you come.”

“No,” you say stubbornly, though you want to.

“Come on,” he whines, coming closer. His cock rubs your pussy through the fabric, making you groan. “Just a little, and then I’ll fuck you into oblivion. What way do you want it?” he murmurs, nose tracing your collarbone. He nips gently. “From behind, against the wall? Or on my bed, legs thrown over my shoulders?”

You stiffen, wanting all of this. Wanting all of that, all of him – and for a brief, fleeting moment, you wonder what you’re doing. Yes, you’re horny. Yes, you’re needy and really want to be fucked. But by Taehyung? By Kim Taehyung, your husband. It’s a horrible idea, awful – but somehow, you can’t find it within yourself to care.

You want this. Want him, have ever since you can remember. Perhaps, you realize, you’ve wanted him all along. Maybe another part of the reason you’re angry is because you like Taehyung. Still like him. Still want him, need him – and he doesn’t want or need you in return.

Tonight, he does though. Steeling yourself, you slide down from his dresser. “Stand,” you say softly, dropping to your knees. “I want you to stand, and if you can’t take it – too bad.”

Yanking his boxers lower, you watch his dick spring up. Taehyung stares, gaze lidded as you take him in your mouth. Lips wrapping around his cock, you ease your head back and he groans, fingers winding their way to your head.

“That’s it,” he murmurs, watching you suck him. “Just like that. God, you’re gorgeous, with your mouth full of cock. You know that, right?”

You know it’s just because you’re sucking his dick, because he likes dirty talk – but still, you let out a hum of pleasure. Taking him further, letting him deep throat – because the way Taehyung moans is too fucking hot.

“Shit,” Taehyung hisses, stomach taut with pleasure. “Yes – yes.”

You continue, twisting your lips as you suck, one hand coming up to cup his balls and after barely a few seconds, Taehyung is opening his eyes.

“Enough,” he growls, bending to lift you. “No more,” he mutters, unhooking your bra from your back. “No more clothes.”

Taehyung pulls you close, cupping your ass while his head drops to your breast. He teases your nipple with his tongue, rolling this with his teeth when his other hand slides between your legs. He forgoes one finger, sliding two inside while you press against him.

“Tae,” you whimper, biting down on his shoulder. “Please, just fuck me.”

He stills – and you realize you called him by his nickname. The nickname you used to use in high school and you freeze, hoping he didn’t notice – but the moment disappears quickly, Taehyung nodding in approval. He moves, pulling you with him to his bed and flopping down on his mattress, pushing himself back to cock a brow. “I want you to ride me,” he announces, locking his hands behind his head.

Taehyung stands erect, hard between his thighs. “Oh?” you respond archly. “You’re going to have to beg for that.”

He just laughs, licking his lips. Reaching for the end table, Taehyung pulls out a condom to undo the wrapper and returning to you, rolls this down his shaft.

“Or,” he murmurs, stroking himself. “You could just be a good girl, and come sit on my dick.”

Slowly, you walk closer; swaying your hips on purpose, watching Taehyung’s eyes follow.

“What will you give me,” you murmur, lowering yourself to his bed. You move until your hips hover over him, placing both hands on his shoulders to look him straight in the eyes. “Husband?”

His eyes darken, hand sliding in between your thighs. His thumb presses to your clit, watching you grind against him.

“I’ll make you come,” he says simply, capturing your lips. “All night,” he mutters, kissing down your neck. His hands find your hips, sliding back to your ass. “Just – please, Y/N. Please,” he whimpers.

A smile lifts your lips. “Since you asked so nicely.”

You sit. Taking him all in one motion, only to groan at the stretch. Taehyung hisses, his arms wrapping hastily around you and he shifts his hips, trying to move – but you shake your head no.

“Wait,” you gasp, swallowing hard. “I just – I just need a moment.”

He’s big. A fact which you knew, but this is different. His cock is hot, throbbing and you feel completely full. “Fuck,” you mutter, burying your head in his neck.

Taehyung’s arms hold you gently, fingers trailing the base of your neck. His lips touch skin, refusing to move until you look up.

“Okay?” he asks softly, concern evident.

You nod, lifting yourself higher – and then slowly, sink back down on his cock. “Oh,” you whimper, and Taehyung smiles.

He grabs hold of your hips, lifting you off him to slowly thrust up. It’s so full, so tight that you clutch him, Taehyung continuing to fuck you with slow, shallow thrusts. He moves until you’re pushing against him, dropping your body to his; moaning with need, with want, with him.

“Like that,” you whisper, dropping one hand between your legs. Helping yourself along, biting at your lip.

Taehyung hisses, flipping you over. “I can do that,” he murmurs, kissing roughly to thrust back in. It’s deep like this, his cock hitting your walls in a way he couldn’t before. You moan out his name, clutching him tighter, nails digging into his back while he fucks you.

Taehyung’s cock moves in and out, his hips rubbing your clit. He slides one hand beneath your knee, opening you further. Fucking you harder, sweat gathering on his brow as he continues to move. The headboard keeps hitting the wall, and you’re searching for something – anything – to brace yourself. Hands fisting in sheets, his hair, finally just him, Taehyung. You wrap yourself tightly around him, deciding you don’t care if he sees.

You don’t care about the consequences. Don’t care if he hates you afterwards. Don’t care that this is just sex, purely physical, because to you – nothing has ever felt this right. When Taehyung comes, his hand between your legs to get you off, you can’t help but moan his name. He chokes on something as well – it’s hard to hear, since his face is buried in your shoulders. His body shudders, shaking above as he empties himself entirely.

When he’s done, when it’s just the sounds of your breathing and bodies in the room – the two of you look at one another. Taehyung exhales, rolling from his bed to go into his bathroom. He cleans himself up, brings out a towel for you and you clean yourself as well, turning to look at him – only to find him fast asleep.

You stare at him for a moment, his head soft on the pillow. He’s snoring, so you lower yourself down in his sheets; sliding closer, you watch his chest rise and fall with his breath. He looks so gentle, so beautiful. You can’t help but want to stay beside him.

It’s while you’re debating whether or not you should, you fall asleep.

You wake up in the middle of the night, or perhaps it’s near morning. It’s hard to tell, since Taehyung sleeps with his blinds closed. You wake up so suddenly, one moment you’re dreaming and the next – well, it still feels like you’re dreaming. Taehyung’s head lies on the pillow, eyelids fluttering with whatever dream he’s having.

You lift a finger and, before you can think twice, move to touch him – only to freeze, within an inch of his cheekbone. You want to kiss him, but can’t. Taehyung doesn’t belong to you.

People should only touch that which belongs to them. And Taehyung, despite the paperwork which says otherwise, is not yours. Stomach sinking, you bring your hand back to your chest.

You’re his, though.

As you stare at him, tears blur your vision. You’ve never stopped belonging to him, even when he didn’t want you to. You never stopped wanting him, not in the deepest parts of yourself. You want the boy he once was, the man he is now. It’s all one and the same to you, it’s all Taehyung and – realizing this, you slip quietly from bed.

Feet padding across the floor, you wish you had more of your clothing. As it is, you walk naked. It’s a good representation of your feelings, you realize, tiptoeing into the hall in nothing but your undergarments pressed to your chest.

Your room is only a few steps away. A few steps, though it may as well be an eternity because inside of your room, you lean your head to the door. Taking a deep breath in, you let yourself cry. Nodding at yourself in the mirror, you throw your clothes down on the floor. Tonight, you’ll let yourself break apart.

And tomorrow, you’ll build yourself anew.

Taehyung is already at the kitchen table when you go down for breakfast. He’s sitting aimlessly, looking up when you enter to pour yourself a cup of coffee, legs crossed beneath the chair while reading the newspaper. Taehyung is one of the few people left in this world who still enjoys the feel of actual ink and paper. Who still likes to hold one in the morning, creasing the pages and smoothing the words.

When you say nothing, he looks down at the page.

“Morning,” you venture, busying yourself with the coffee maker.

“Morning.”

That’s it. When you turn around to look at him, he’s not looking at you. Taehyung stares at his paper, expression carefully cultivated and everything you wanted to say to him dies in your throat. After crying yourself to sleep last night, you wondered if maybe you were just being stupid. If maybe he felt the same, if Taehyung’s feelings for you have changed since high school.

Now you realize how foolish this was. Taehyung has never been interested and the way he’s acting now just confirms this. Likely, he feels embarrassed, regretful and when you recognize those signs, you slam the coffee pot down on the counter.

“Have a good day,” you choke, before leaving.

Taehyung clicks on his jazz music when you go.

Monday, at work, you’re in a foul mood. Not just because of the events of this weekend, though that contributes to it a good deal. Mostly, you’ve managed to compartmentalize, though. Mostly, you’ve managed to shove this horrid, gaping hole of yours aside.

You’ve done this for god knows how many years and, sighing deeply, you slide your face into your hands. A soft knock on your cubicle forces you to look up.

“Yes?” you blink, jerking upwards.

Mo peers back. When she sees you sitting, shoulders slumped and expression tortured, she arches a brow. “Bad timing?”

Shaking your head, you lean back in your chair. “Not at all. Sorry, I was just taking a break.”

Mo grins, entering quickly to collapse into your second chair. “Ugh,” she groans, sticking out her feet. “Why are Monday’s so fucking awful?”

“Mhm,” you nod, scanning your desk. “I know. Ever since Tim switched, it’s been chaotic.”

Mo leans forward and nods. “Totally. About that,” she whispers, voice dropping.

You look up, surprised by her tone. “Yeah?”

She arches a brow. “You can tell me, you know.”

This gives you pause, struggling to think of something you know. “I can… tell you, what?”

“Yeah,” Mo nods, as though you understand. “You can say it! I won’t tell, I was just curious, when I heard. I know how much of a dick Tim can be sometimes.”

“I,” you hesitate, brow furrowed. “Yeah, Tim can be a bit much. I – wait, what are you talking about?”

Mo freezes, her eyes wide. “You mean… you don’t know?”

“Know what?” you exclaim, then lower your voice. “Know what?”

Mo grimaces, sliding her tongue over the back of her teeth. “Well, this is awkward,” she winces. “I just – well, heard a rumor. I don’t know if it’s true, but since I heard Taehyung was the reason, I figured you would know.”

“I swear to god, if you don’t – ”

“I heard Taehyung is the reason Tim got transferred.”

Your hands freeze on your paper. The entire room swirls, Mo’s face fading in and out of view. “M-my Taehyung?” you stammer.

“Yeah,” Mo nods, eyebrows raised. “I figured, well – Tim is such a skeeze. I thought maybe he’d hit on you, and your husband went all White Knight on his ass. Maybe I’m wrong,” Mo adds, falsely bright. “Ah, sorry Y/N! I thought that you knew.”

“No,” you murmur, lost in thought. “I didn’t.”

Mo stays in your cubicle only a few minutes before leaving, probably sensing you’re distracted by this new piece of information. Once she’s gone, you sit, staring blankly at your computer. Taehyung had Tim switched to another department. Taehyung called in a favor, spoke to someone, did something – which resulted in Tim being transferred away.

But why? The only thing you can think of is that meeting before lunch. The one where Taehyung walked and saw Tim being too touchy. If that was it though, it doesn’t make sense. Your husband has never once cared about who you talked to before. Never cared who you saw, who you hung out with. It makes no sense for him to suddenly up and move Tim because he hit on you.

Then a light dawns, remembering the phone calls. It was unusual for Taehyung to speak on the phone at all, let alone twice in one meal. He values his personal time too highly, refuses to work when he’s with you. To do so twice, in one lunch. You frown.

Before you can stop yourself, you’re standing up from your chair. Tossing your laptop into your bag to text your boss that you’re sick and need to work from home but the moment you exit the building, you turn right instead of left. You exit the subway in the financial district, walking the one block north until you reach Taehyung’s building.

“Mrs. Kim,” the receptionist smiles, recognizing you. He looks down at his computer, then frowns. “I’m sorry – did you have lunch with your husband? I just pulled up his schedule and I don’t see it. I could be wrong, though.”

“Ah, no,” you hesitate, shifting your weight. Smoothing a crease in your outfit, you realizing how crazy this is. “I just need to drop something off in his office.”

When the receptionist arches a brow, you wince, realizing how it sounds.

He just nods though, bending to search for a visitor’s badge. “Here you go,” he smiles, handing it over. “You remember Mr. Kim’s office location, yes? Floor eighty; end of the hall and to the right.”

You nod, accepting the badge to hurry sideways. No, you don’t remember Taehyung’s office because you’ve never been here before. On the inside of the elevator, you start to second guess yourself. You’re reading too much into things. Taehyung might have done this as a misguided favor, saw you looking uncomfortable and... you steel yourself, straightening your spine. You’ll never know, if you don’t ask him.

The floors tick by while you stare at nothing and try to convince yourself this is still a good idea. The eightieth floor, when it opens, is quiet, elevator doors sliding shut to leave you alone in the hallway. Standing there for a moment, it takes a while to gather your courage before continuing to walk.

You see Taehyung’s office almost immediately, since it takes up nearly the entire length of the hall. The walls are solid, doors made of glass in large, imposing panels you stop at the entrance of. Taehyung sits at his desk on a phone call, his back to the doors facing over the city. You see his feet kicked up on a filing cabinet and can tell from his expression he’s agitated.

You can see this plainly when he runs a hand through his hair. Taehyung only does this when he’s nervous or lying and, heart sinking, you remember how easily you used to read him. How deeply you knew him and taking a deep breath, you knock once on his door.

Taehyung swivels and places his feet on the floor. He’s frowning, already holding up a finger – the universal sign for just a minute – but when sees that it’s you, he freezes. Speaking quickly, you’re not sure what he says before hanging up the phone.

Taehyung stands from his desk, still staring. He watches you, waiting – until you arch a brow and glance down at the handle. “Oh, fuck,” he groans – you read this clearly on his lips – as he presses the buzzer.

The moment the door is unlocked, you step in. “Hi.”

Taehyung stares back at you, wide-eyed. “Hey.” He looks around. “What are you doing here?”

Remaining silent, you glance around the space of his office. It’s strange, since this is the first time you’ve ever been here. Normally, you just meet Taehyung in the lobby but his office is clean, organized in a way that’s reminiscent of himself. Everything is in straight lines, no nonsense – but here and there, there are glimpses. You see the same wedding photo that exists in your cubicle, framed square on his desk.

It’s facing outwards, so that whoever sits in the meeting chair can see and, taking a step closer, you let your fingers trail over the frame.

“Conversational piece,” Taehyung admits, clearing his throat. “For when people visit.”

“Ah,” you nod, turning away.

The skyline before you is enormous, stretching from one end of the room to the other. Taehyung’s desk sits at one end, a conference room at the other. Table, chairs, a projector and monitors set up.

You’re about to walk over – when you spot the wall behind his desk.

“What?” Taehyung turns – then flushes, seeing where you look. “Ah, that’s – nothing,” he hastens, lifting a hand before dropping it. “It’s just… silly.”

“It’s us,” you whisper, stepping past.

It is you, but not a photo you remember. You can’t be older than sixteen. You’re grinning, laughing with Taehyung’s arm stretched around you. He still has his baby fat, something which will disappear as he grows. You still have your braces, although you must be close to getting rid of them, since your teeth are near straight and even.

It’s fall, the leaves are orange behind you and Taehyung doesn’t look at the camera, but instead stares at you. He’s looking at you with that look in his eyes, the look you recognize because it’s the same one he wears in the photo you have in your office.

Slowly, you turn to face him. “Why do you have this?” you ask.

“I...” Taehyung hesitates, rubbing the back of his neck. “I like the picture.”

You stare at him for a moment. Then you say, “Kim Taehyung. Did you transfer Tim to a different department?”

Taehyung’s eyes widen. “Wh – what? Who told you that?”

“Taehyung,” you laugh, although there’s no humor in it. “What in the hell were you thinking? That’s my workplace! I’m a professional, you can’t just run around acting like a – god, I don’t even know what you acted like. Some jealous, idiotic moron.”

“I know,” Taehyung exhales, oddly nevous. “I shouldn’t have done it. You just looked so uncomfortable,” he blurts, pushing a hand through his hair – a nervous habit. “I’ve never seen you look that way and I wanted to protect you, wanted you happy and I – may not have handled it very well,” he admits, hands falling to his sides.

“Handled it well?” you scoff, expression hard. “This is so embarrassing!”

Immediately, you wish you could take that back because Taehyung stares at you, looking tortured and pained – and you can’t explain why, but you take a step closer.

“Taehyung.”

You wait until he looks at you.

He swallows. “Yes?”

“Why?” you ask, uncertain what you’re searching for. “Why did you switch Tim from my team?”

The longer Taehyung stares, the more his expression darkens. “I didn’t want him making you uncomfortable. Why did you leave?” he asks, challenging you with his own question.

You blink at him, thrown. “Leave… when?”

Taehyung takes a step closer. “After,” his blurts, voice catching. “Why didn’t you stay with me, that night?”

“Stay... with you?” you repeat, startled when his hand finds yours.

Taehyung looks down at your fingers in his. Your hands just touch, nothing more – but somehow, it’s the most romantic gesture he’s ever done.

“I wanted you there,” he admits, helpless. “I wanted you to stay with me, to fall asleep with me, to hold you in my bed. I didn’t know how to ask.” Taehyung stammers a bit, falling over the words. “I… know, you’ve never considered me in that way.”

“What?” Your mouth drops and you’re aware this must be highly unattractive, but you can’t find it within yourself to care. “I’ve never looked at you? What the hell do you mean by that, Kim Taehyung?”

He looks taken aback by your tone. “In the cafeteria,” he responds simply. “I asked Kelsey to see if you liked me – I was standing behind you and I overhead everything when you said that you didn’t.”

Sharp horror jabs at your thoughts. The realization is painful; the fact that he heard, the fact that Taehyung has lived with this knowledge as long as you have. He thought you didn’t like him, thought you didn’t care. Your eyes drift shut, the memories reshuffling in the chaos. Taehyung thought you didn’t like him. He heard you say all those awful things when you wanted Kelsey off your back – and he thought you meant them.

You’re barely aware when you step forward. Your hands find his chest, sliding up his body and into his hair.

“No, no, no,” you say, opening your eyes. “I just said those things to shut Kelsey up. She said you couldn’t like me, that you’d never want me – she was teasing me, saying I liked you. I... just snapped,” you admit, voice soft. “I said those things to get her to stop talking. But you,” you say, lower lip trembling. “You thought I didn’t like you?”

Taehyung nods as your hands wind into his hair. “I...” He sounds dazed by this realization. “Fuck.”

“So. That’s why you said what you did? With those boys, in the hallway.”

The room is quiet and you don’t have to look to know that he’s nodding. Just the sounds of breath and memory lie between you, fading to nothing when Taehyung grasps your hands with his.

You look up.

“Yeah,” he admits. “I was angry, upset. I thought you didn’t care about me, so when they teased me, I pushed them away. I’m so sorry, darling,” he whispers, the endearment taking on whole different tone. “I didn’t mean for – I didn’t know you were there. When you kept ignoring me and refused to talk, I figured...” He swallows. “I figured I should take the hint.”

“All this time,” you manage, your laughter turning to hiccups. “All this time, I’ve liked you and you’ve liked me.”

Taehyung nods, the corner of his mouth lifting. “We’ve been pretty fucking stupid, haven’t we?”

“The stupidest.”

“No more,” he murmurs, bending his head. Taehyung’s lips stop just over yours. “The day my father asked me to marry you, I swear I stopped breathing. To have everything I ever wanted, everything I ever dreamed of, but,” he stops, mouth twisting. “To have you not want me. I didn’t know what to do, how to make you fall in love with me when I felt so much.”

“You… love me?” you ask, hands clutching his like a lifeline.

Taehyung’s gaze lightens. “Of course, I love you. I’ve loved you since we were twelve, and you kept kicking my ass at call of duty.”

Laughing gently, you touch his cheek. “I thought you hated me for that.”

“That, too.”

You shake your head, memorizing the way he looks, the way he feels, the very touch of him. No longer are you just his, you realize; this time he’s yours. You belong to one another, have belonged long before the words appeared on paper. When Taehyung kisses you now, the gesture is soft and sweet. You feel it in your bones and inhale him with sudden certainty.

“But you were such an ass to me,” you grumble, grinning when Taehyung starts to laugh.

“Of course.” He pulls back to bop you on the nose. “You wouldn’t look at me, otherwise.”

“You could have, I don’t know, said you liked me.”

“So much more than like, though.”

“Mhm, well just to be –"

“Shut up,” Taehyung groans, before kissing you again.

[Bound Series Master List]

drabble from my 30K followers game with Taehyung + Y/N in a super fluffy fight

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